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by Toni Jordan

Grace Lisa Vandenburg, the narrator of this pleasant neurotic-girl-meets-boy debut, is 35 years old and has been addicted to counting since she was eight. She lives alone in Melbourne, Australia, and is on sick leave from her teaching job, filling her weeks with counting—steps and syllables and bites and things—and sticking to her rigid routines, which include trips to the cafe and phone calls from her mother and self-absorbed younger sister. The only person in her life Grace relates to is her 10-year-old niece, Hilary, who is as quirky and charming as Grace is. Things are fine until Grace meets Seamus Joseph O'Reilly, an Irish transplant who works at the local movie theater. Grace has not been on a date in two years and six months and hasn't been in love in forever, but as things progress with Seamus, she realizes what she has been missing. With some gentle encouragement, Grace agrees to test her boundaries and tries to find a happy medium between her obsession and living a full life. The novel does everything a sweet, agreeable romantic comedy should.

Best Price $6.75

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by Steve Tolz

“A Fraction of the Whole is that rarest of long books–utterly worth it…The story starts in a prison riot and ends on a plane, and there is not one forgettable episode in between…It reads like Mark Twain with access to an intercontinental Airbus…This book moves; it bucks and rocks in a world that feels more than a hemisphere away…So comically dark and inviting that you have no choice but to step into its icy wake.” —Esquire
“Rollicking…laugh-out-loud funny.” —Entertainment Weekly
“A rich father-and-son story packed with incident, humor, and characters reminiscent of the styles of Charles Dickens and John Irving…Occasionally, a big, sprawling first novel fights its way into print with a flourish, at which point its ambition and the eccentricities of its ‘firstness’ can become its best marketing tools. Such is the case with A Fraction of the Whole, a book that is willfully misanthropic and very funny…like Irving, Toltz makes minor characters leap off the page…He’s a superb, disturbing phrasemaker…this long novel, which lives or dies in the brilliance of its writing, has a subtle, compelling structure…A Fraction of the Whole soars like a rocket.” —Los Angeles Times
“Combines the hilarious high-low reference points of early Martin Amis with the annihilating punk inventiveness of Chuck Palahniuk.” —Best Life

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by Tim Winton

Bruce Pike, a middle-aged paramedic, is adept at distinguishing a suicide from an error in judgment; his own turbulent adolescence accounts for this grim bit of wisdom. Growing up in a conservative Australian mill town not far from the coast, he and a daredevil buddy are swiftly drawn by the call of the big wave: "I couldn’t take my eyes from those plumes of spray, the churning shards of light." The youngest surfers on the beach, they are tutored in the more arcane aspects of the sport by a charismatic older man named Sando. Sando’s wife, meanwhile, represents another sort of danger: once a freestyle skier, she’s now housebound with a mangled knee, and hungers for the thrills that once sustained her. Winton’s latest novel is both a hymn to the beauty of flying on water and a sober assessment of the costs of losing one’s balance, in every sense of the word.

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by Claire Thomas

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by Louis Nowra

Ice tells the story of Malcolm McEacharn, the man who brings joy to early Sydney in the form of an iceberg and who later pioneers the first successful refrigerated voyage from Australia to London. He is a brilliant businessman who will later bring electricity to Melbourne, become its Lord Mayor and be one step away from becoming Prime Minister - but he is driven by an obsession that threatens to destroy him and his world.

Ice also tells a parallel story, set in contemporary Sydney, of a young biographer who lies in a coma, and her bereft husband's desperate attempts to resurrect her by unearthing the truth about her subject McEacharn.

From the frozen, desolate Antarctic to bustling Victorian London, from the Yorkshire moors to colonial tropical Cairns, to Imperial Japan and to the gritty streets of modern-day Kings Cross, Ice walks the line between life and death, fact and fantasy, grief and madness. It is a book about the power of love, told with audacity and breathtaking imaginative power. It will never let you go.

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by Sofie Laguna

“The stars shine brightest out of the deepest dark . . .” A child is imprisoned in a house by her reclusive, religious parents. Hester Wakefield has never spoken to another child, nor seen the outside world. Her one possession is an illustrated children’s Bible, and its imagery forms the sole basis for her capacity to make poetic, real-life connections. Her companions at home are Cat, Spoon, Door, Handle, Broom, and Tree, and they all speak to her, sometimes telling her what to do. One day she takes a brave Alice in Wonderland trip into the forbidden outside, at the behest of Handle, and this overwhelming encounter with light and sky and sunshine is a marvel to her. From this moment on, Hester learns that there are some things she cannot tell her parents, and she keeps this secret to herself. Hester buries it among her other secrets, the ones that take place in the shadowy corners of her insular world, and she keeps them all locked inside her as they multiply and grow, waiting until she can find other ways to be free.

One Foot Wrong challenges the boundaries of right and wrong, sanity and madness, love and justice, poetry and life. The story told by Hester is often dark and harrowing, but the affecting impact of her distinctive voice and her way of seeing the world illuminates every page and makes this novel an exhilarating, enlightening and, ultimately, an uplifting and transformative experience.
 

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by Ian Townsend

A forgotten fragment of Australia's past inspires a powerful new novel. It is the end of the nineteenth century, and one of the most powerful storms in history is born when a hurricane named Mahina moves across the Coral Sea. To a remote part of the Queensland coast come the hundreds of sails of the northern pearling fleets and a native policeman trying to solve a murder. Nearly two thousand men, women and children are gathering around Cape Melville, right in the path of the storm that is about to cause Australia's deadliest natural disaster. Based on real events, this is the story of an unstoppable force of nature and the birth and death of an Australian dream.

by Murray Bail

"From the Hardcover edition."

Review
“One of the great and most surprising courtships in literature.”–Michael Ondaatje

“A most unusual, enchanting work . . . a novel of most beguiling originality.”–Daily Telegraph

Not available from Amazon, but free for Pivotal Book Club members

by Christos Tsiolkas

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 on to 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.

by Richard Flanagan

Acclaimed Tasmanian author Flanagan (The Unknown Terrorist, 2006) explores the pursuit and denial of desire as it affects individual lives, even history, in his fifth novel. With his native country (then called Van Diemen’s Land) as the starting point, he elucidates the Victorian contention that only savages such as the native Aborigines are ruled by their passions. Yet when Sir John Franklin takes governance of the land in 1836, his wife is so taken with Aborigine orphan Mathinna that she adopts the child, intending to make her a proper Englishwoman. Years later in London, Lady Jane Franklin enlists Charles Dickens to write a defense against the charge of cannibalism on her husband’s long-missing Arctic expedition. Obsessed with the expedition’s story, Dickens writes (in collaboration with Wilkie Collins) and stars in the play “The Frozen Deep,” during which the writer who trumpeted the joys of family life falls in love with young actress Ellen Ternan and soon divorces his wife. Although the bare bones of this novel are historically accurate, connecting them to focus on desire seems a stretch, but Flanagan’s masterful probing of emotion with his vibrant prose helps compensate for problems of plot.