Ten Book Tuesday...looking for a good book? Try one of these recent releases!
Seven letters from Paris by Samantha VérantIn the best romantic tradition of Almost French, a woman falls madly in love with a Frenchman in Paris, but with a twist. It takes her twenty years to find him again …
Samantha's life is falling apart - she's lost her job, her marriage is on the rocks and she's walking dogs to keep the wolf from the door.
When she stumbles across seven love letters from the handsome Frenchman she fell head over heels for in Paris when she was 19, she can't help but wonder, what if?
One carefully worded, very belated email apology, it's clear that sometimes love does give you a second chance.
What days are for by Robert Dessaix
One Sunday night in Sydney, Robert Dessaix collapses in a gutter in Darlinghurst, and is helped to his hotel by a kind young man wearing a T-shirt that says F---K YOU. What follows are weeks in hospital, tubes and cannulae puncturing his body, as he recovers from the heart attack threatening daily to kill him.
While lying in the hospital bed, Robert chances upon Philip Larkin's poem 'Days'. What, he muses, have his days been for? What and who has he loved – and why?
Flying shoes by Lisa Howorth
Mary Byrd Thornton could understand how a reporter couldn't resist the story: a nine-year-old boy sexually molested and killed on Mother's Day, 1966. A suspect to whom nothing would stick. A neighborhood riddled with secrets. No one, especially the bungling or complicit authorities, had been able to solve the crime. Now, thirty years later, the reporter's call will reel a reluctant Mary Byrd from Mississippi back to Virginia where she must confront her family-and, once again, the murder's irremovable stain of tragedy.
Time and time again by Ben Elton
It's the 1st of June 1914 and Hugh Stanton, ex-soldier and celebrated adventurer is quite literally the loneliest man on earth. No one he has ever known or loved has been born yet. Perhaps now they never will be.
Stanton knows that a great and terrible war is coming. A collective suicidal madness that will destroy European civilization and bring misery to millions in the century to come. He knows this because, for him, that century is already history.
Somehow he must change that history. He must prevent the war. A war that will begin with a single bullet. But can a single bullet truly corrupt an entire century?
And, if so, could another single bullet save it?
Laurinda by Alice Pung
When my dad dropped us off at the front gate, the first things I saw were the rose garden spreading out on either side of the main driveway and the enormous sign in iron cursive letters spelling out LAURINDA. No 'Ladies College' after it, of course; the name was meant to speak for itself.
Laurinda is an exclusive school for girls. At its secret core is the Cabinet, a trio of girls who wield power over their classmates - and some of their teachers.
Entering this world of wealth and secrets is Lucy Lam, a scholarship girl with sharp eyes and a shaky sense of self. As she watches the Cabinet at work, and is courted by them, Lucy finds herself in a battle for her identity and integrity.
Navigatio by Patrick Holland
Navigatio tells the story of Saint Brendan of Clonfert, a sixth century monk and adventurer, and his legendary quest for the Isle of the Blessed via a gauntlet of monsters, devils, angels, prophets and beautiful maidens. Brendan's battles with the sea and the cosmos bear out what William Faulkner once called ‘the human heart in conflict with itself’. This haunting parable of darkness and light, of temptation and belief, of voice and silence, is told with the utmost economy of words, making it a small masterpiece of compassionate perception.
First impressions: a novel about old books, young love and Jane Austen by Charlie Lovett
Book lover and Austen enthusiast Sophie Collingwood has recently taken a job at an antiquarian bookshop in London when two different customers request a copy of the same obscure book: the second edition of Little Book of Allegories by Richard Mansfield. Their queries draw Sophie into a mystery that will cast doubt on the true authorship of Pride and Prejudice—and ultimately threaten Sophie’s life.
Paint your wife by Lloyd Jones
Long ago, when the men were away at the war, Alma began painting the women of the town. They sat for him in lieu of payment for his work catching rats. Alice, his favourite, returned his attentions, and when her husband, George, came home from the war, he set out to prove his love and reclaim his wife by moving a hill—wheelbarrow by wheelbarrow—for her.
Now, decades later, Alma’s ‘in lieu of’ payment is revived, and the townspeople, looking to escape various corners of despair, turn to drawing classes. For when you draw, the only thing that matters is what lies before you.
South of darkness by John Marsden
Thirteen-year-old Barnaby Fletch is a bag-and-bones orphan in London in the late 1700s.
Barnaby lives on his wits and ill-gotten gains, on streets seething with the press of the throng and shadowed by sinister figures. Life is a precarious business.
When he hears of a paradise on the other side of the world - a place called Botany Bay - he decides to commit a crime and get himself transported to a new life, a better life.
To succeed, he must survive the trials of Newgate Prison, the stinking hull of a prison ship and the unknown terrors of a journey across the world.
And Botany Bay is far from the paradise Barnaby has imagined. When his past and present suddenly collide, he is soon fleeing for his life - once again.
Mercenary mum: My journey from young mother to Baghdad body guard by Neryl Joyce
Mercenary Mum is the true story of a young single mother who went from working at her local Woolworths store to serving as a soldier in the Australian Army's elite Close Personal Protection Unit. She then left the army to become a high-risk security contractor, where she was responsible for protecting high-threat targets from assassination and opportune attack in Iraq. Neryl reveals what it's like to be a woman in a private army trying to survive in a prejudiced man's world, exposed to alcohol-fuelled parties, drugs and sexual abuse. Neryl's professional and personal resolve is pushed to its outermost limit when she is confronted by a shocking ambush and death on the world's most dangerous road in Iraq. How did a naïve little girl start out playing with Barbie dolls and end up playing with guns and working for the most powerful security company in Baghdad – and how did she manage to survive with her sanity intact?
