Bestsellers for May 2009

1	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.
2	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!
3	Map of the Invisible World    Tash Aw    Harper Collins    $32.95
		From the author of the internationally acclaimed award winning “The Harmony Silk Factory”, comes an enthralling new novel that evokes an exotic yet turbulent and often frightening world. 16 year old Adam is an orphan three times over. He and his older brother Johan were abandoned by their mother as children; he watched as Johan was adopted and taken away by a wealthy couple; and he had to hide when Karl the Dutch man who raised him was arrested by soldiers during Sukarno’s drive to purge 1960s Indonesia of its colonial past. Adam sets out on a quest to find Karl but all he has to guide him are some old photos and letters which send him to the colourful, dangerous capital Jakarta. Johan, meanwhile, is living a seemingly carefree privileged life in Malaysia but is careering out of control, unable to forget the long ago betrayal of his helpless, trusting brother. Map of the Invisible World is a masterful novel and confirms Tash Aw as one of the most exciting young writers at work today.
4	The Little Stranger    Sarah Waters    Virago    $32.99
		For those of you who have loved Sarah Water’s historical novels, here is a treat in store! This time we have a chilling ghost story, set in a crumbling country house in Warwickshire just after the Second World War. The Ayres family are struggling to keep their estate and home together and coping with their son’s war injuries and other family griefs. Dr Faraday, the narrator of the story, is summoned to the house, which holds memories from his childhood (his mother used to work there as nursery maid). His involvement with the family and the subsequent suprising and disturbing events that evolve, make for a story that will have you turning the pages and desperate to discuss the book with a friend once you have finished! Sarah Waters is certainly a master story teller and her evocations of a changed way of life are unsurpassed.
5	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.
6	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.
7	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.
8	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.
9	The Winter Vault    Anne Michaels    Penguin    $32.99
		At last we can enjoy the long-awaited novel from the Orange Prize winning author of “Fugitive Pieces”! This fascinating and beautifully written novel is set in Egypt in 1964. The great temple at Abu Simbel must be rescued from the rising waters of the Aswan Dam. Block by block it must be dismantled and reconstructed 60 metres higher. This most delicate and daunting of tasks is overseen by Avery, a young engineer who is carefully and joyfully starting his new life with his wife Jean. But all does not go as straightforwardly as hoped, both in the project and in their relationship. The couple’s grief takes the reader to Canada, Poland and other times of loss and reconstruction. “The Winter Vault” tells of the ways in which we salvage what we can from the violence of life, the power of memories and the restorative power of love. A memorable and haunting read.
10	Selected Works of T.S.Spivet    Reif Larsen    Random House    $34.95
		This has to be one of the most original books of the year. T.S. Spivet is a 12 year-old genius, living on a ranch in Montana with his most unusual family and documenting everything with meticulous detailed drawings and maps, in different coloured notebooks. He is brilliant and the Smithsonian Institute agrees – so much so that they are awarding him a major prize. The only problem is that they don’t realise that he is only 12 years old! T.S. decides to go to Washington to accept the prize and his adventure to get there is touching, hilarious and meticulously documented. This is a book to keep and savour and will be enjoyed by all ages and men and women alike

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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