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Books for you to Read Right Now

 

 

Zero Day

by David Baldacci

Busy Baldacci, already on his third hardcover of the year (after The Sixth Man and One Summer), here launches a new series starring combat veteran John Puller. Now a top-notch investigator in the U.S. Army’s Criminal Investigative Division, Puller is asked to look into the murder of an army man and his wife, a Pentagon contractor, in their isolated rural home.

   
   
   

Her Father's Daughter

Alice Pung

As she digs further into her father's story, Alice embarks on a journey of painful discovery: of memories lost and found, of her own fears for the future, of history and how it echoes down the years. Set in Melbourne, China and Cambodia, Her Father's Daughter captures a father-daughter relationship in a moving and astonishingly powerful way.

 

 

   

Stieg and Me

Eva Gabrielsson

 

 "I would have preferred to have never written this book. It speaks of Stieg, of our life together, and of my life after his death," writes Gabrielsson early in her book. It was written because she alone can tell this story.

 

   

A Dance with Dragons

George R.R. Martin

The long-awaited fifth volume in the hugely popular and highly acclaimed epic fantasy A SONG OF ICE AND FIRE The last of the Targaryons, Daenerys Stormborn, the Unburnt, has brought the young dragons in her care to their terrifying maturity. Now the war-torn landscape of the Seven Kingdoms is threatened by destruction as vast as in the violent past.

   

Winner:  Australian Book Industry Awards 2011: Book of the Year, Newcomer of the Year and Biography of the Year (won jointly)

The Happiest Refugee

Anh Do

Anh Do nearly didn't make it to Australia. His entire family came close to losing their lives on the sea as they escaped from war-torn Vietnam in an overcrowded boat. The Happiest Refugee tells the incredible, uplifting and inspiring life story of one of our favourite personalities. Tragedy, humour, heartache and unswerving determination - a big life with big dreams. Anh's story will move and amuse all who read it.

   

I Am Number Four

Pittacus Lore

They caught Number One in Malaysia.
Number Two in England.
And Number Three in Kenya.
They killed them all.

I am Number Four.

I am next.

   

Winner:  Sir Julius Vogel Award, Best Novel – Adult

Beyond the Wall of Time         

Russell Kirkpatrick

The stunning conclusion to the Broken Man trilogy. The wall of time has fallen and the gods are free to ravage the world. The few that know of their escape into mortal lands are under the control of the malevolent Husk. Stella, a queen in hiding, makes a deal with the Undying Man.

   

Cloudstreet TV-tie-in

Tim Winton

Could you share a haunted house with eight strangers and a talking pig?  Well, sometimes you don't get a choice.
Australia's favourite novel is a funny, heartbreaking story of making-do and yearning to belong.  Now a major television miniseries, Cloudstreet will live with you long after you've turned the final page.

   

The Price of Life

Nigel Brennan

Nigel travelled to Somalia with a Canadian journalist to cover the humanitarian and food crises, the ongoing conflict and drought that has ravaged Somalia for nearly 20 years.  Four days after arriving in Mogadishu, they where ambushed just outside the capital. They were to be held hostage for the next 462 days.

   

Sing You Home

Jodi Picoult

After Zoe and Max's last attempt to conceive fails tragically, their marriage breaks apart. When Zoe falls in love again and considers having a family, she remembers that there are still frozen embryos that were never used. But who do they really belong to? An honest and moving story of contemporary relationships and the consequences when love and desire collide with science and the law.

   

The Tiger's Wife

by Tea Obreht

The Orange Prize winning debut from a truly extraordinary talent. 'Having sifted through everything I have heard about the tiger and his wife, I can tell you that this much is fact: in April of 1941, without declaration or warning, the German bombs started falling over the city and did not stop for three days. The tiger did not know that they were bombs...'

   

A Visit from the Goon Squad

Winner - 2011 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction

Jennifer Egan

Readers will be pleased to discover that the star-crossed marriage of lucid prose and expertly deployed postmodern switcheroos that helped shoot Egan to the top of the genre-bending new school is alive in well in this graceful yet wild novel.  Egan's overarching concerns are about how rebellion ages, influence corrupts, habits turn to addictions, and lifelong friendships fluctuate and turn. Egan answers the questions elegantly, though not straight on, as this powerful novel chronicles how and why we change, even as the song stays the same.

   

Batavia

 

Peter FitzSimons

 

The shipwreck of the Batavia combines in just the one tale the birth of the world's first corporation, the brutality of colonisation, the battle of good versus evil, the derring-do of sea-faring adventure, mutiny, love, lust, blood-lust, petty fascist dictatorship, criminality, a reign of terror, murders most foul, sexual slavery, natural nobility, survival, retribution, rescue, first contact with native peoples and so much more.

   

When We Have Wings

by Claire Corbett

In a world divided into fliers and non-fliers, how far would you go to be able to fly? How much would you sacrifice - perhaps your own child? A beautifully written and compellingly original novel of sacrifice, betrayal and love.

   

Live Wire

by Harlan Coben

Edgar-winner Coben's 10th Myron Bolitar novel (after Long Lost) is a perfect 10: providing readers with new information about the past of the former athlete turned agent and owner of MB Reps; a satisfyingly complex mystery; and the always entertaining, sometimes shocking exploits of Bolitar's partner and friend, Windsor Horne Lockwood III (aka Win).

   

The 4-Hour Body: An Uncommon Guide to Rapid Fat-loss, Incredible Sex and Becoming Superhuman 

 

By  Timothy Ferriss

Whatever your physical goal, "The 4-Hour Body" eclipses every other health manual by sharing the best kept secrets in the latest science and research to provide new strategies for redesigning the human body.

 

   

Water for Elephants

by Sara Gruen

  •  As a young man, Jacob Jankowski was tossed by fate onto a rickety train that was home to the Benzini Brothers Most Spectacular Show on Earth. It was the early part of the great Depression, and for Jacob, now ninety, the circus world he remembers was both his salvation and a living hell.

 

   

The Lake of Dreams
 

by Kim Edwards

 

At a crossroads in her life, Lucy Jarrett returns home to upstate New York from Japan, only to find herself haunted by her father's unresolved death a decade ago.  With her signature gifts of lyricism, suspense, and masterly storytelling, Kim Edwards's new novel will delight those who loved The Memory Keeper's Daughter and mesmerize millions of new fans.

   

The Little Coffee Shop in Kabul

by Deborah Rodriguez

A heart-warming novel about a little cafe in Kabul, and the five extraordinary women who meet there ...

 

   

Follow the Money

by Peter Corriss

Battle-scarred but indefatigable PI, Cliff Hardy has lost all his dough to an unscrupulous financial advisor. He's got to follow the money trail deep into Sydney's underbelly into the territory of big money and bent deals to get himself back in the black.

   

Dead or Alive

by Tom Clancy and Grant Blackwood

After almost a decade, Tom Clancy-the acknowledged master of international intrigue and nonstop military action – returns to the world he knows better than anyone: a world of chaos, caught in the crossfire of politics and power, placed on the edge of annihilation by evil men.

But there are other men who are honour-bound to stop the bloodshed and protect their homeland – by any means necessary . . .
 

   

Tinkers

Winner - 2010 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction

by Paul Harding

Heartbreaking and life affirming, TINKERS is an elegiac meditation on love, loss, and the fierce beauty of nature.

   

At Home with the Templetons

 

by Monica McInerney

 

When the Templeton family from England takes up residence in a stately home in country Australia, they set the locals talking – and with good reason.  From Australia's top-selling female novelist comes her best book yet – a wonderfully entertaining and touching story about the perils and pleasures of love, friendship and family

   

Fall of Giants

by Ken Follett

A huge novel that follows five families through the world-shaking dramas of the First World War, the Russian Revolution, and the struggle for votes for women.

   
 Last Sacrifice (Vampire Academy, Book 6)

Richelle Mead

The astonishing final novel in Richelle Mead's epic series!

Murder. Love. Jealousy. And the ultimate sacrifice. Now, with Rose on trial for her life and Lissa first in line for the Royal Throne, nothing will ever be the same between them.

   

Decision Points

 

~ George W. Bush

 

In this candid and gripping account, President George W. Bush describes the critical decisions that shaped his presidency and personal life.

Decision Points brings readers inside the Texas governor's mansion on the night of the 2000 election, aboard Air Force One during the harrowing hours after the attacks of September 11, 2001, into the Situation Room moments before the start of the war in Iraq, and behind the scenes at the White House for many other historic presidential decisions.

A groundbreaking new brand of presidential memoir, Decision Points will captivate supporters, surprise critics, and change perspectives on eight remarkable years in American history—and on the man at the center of events.

   

Land's Edge: a Coastal Memoir

 

~ Tim Winton

 

'In this record of a life-long love affair with the sea, Tim Winton's prose ripples, shimmers and surges with awe and respect for how the ocean has not only sustained him physically and emotionally but determined the very rhythms of his life.' 
FIONA CAPP, THE AGE 

   

The Windup Girl

 

by Paolo Becigalupi

 

"both a heart-stopping dystopian thriller and a razor-sharp vision of our near future. The story is set in a chilling near future Thailand, where calories count as currency with the world’s foodstuffs becoming depleted."

Time Magazine named The Windup Girlby Paolo Bacigalupi as one of its ten best novels of the year. And the book has also won an extraordinary five of 2010′s major international SF awards: the Hugo, Nebula, Locus, Compton Crook Award and John W. Campbell Memorial Award.

   

Cross Fire                                                                                

~ by James Patterson

Death's shadow passes close to home in this latest installment of Patterson's long-running Det. Alex Cross series. When the remains of Alex's estranged niece are discovered in the trunk of a car, his investigation takes him into the powerful, protected, and very decadent world of the Washington elite.

 

   

The Lost Symbol  (paperback)                                                                Book Club notes

~by Dan Brown                                                                         Reader's Guide

 

In this stunning follow-up to the global phenomenon The Da Vinci Code, Dan Brown demonstrates once again why he is the world’s most popular thriller writer. The Lost Symbolis a masterstroke of storytelling that finds famed symbologist Robert Langdon in a deadly race through a real-world labyrinth of codes, secrets, and unseen truths . . . all under the watchful eye of Brown’s most terrifying villain to date. Set within the hidden chambers, tunnels, and temples of Washington, D.C."The Lost Symbolis an intelligent, lightning-paced story with surprises at every turn.  This is Dan Brown’s most exciting novel yet.

   
   

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