Books in the news...
Check out these new fiction and non -fiction titles from Spectrum, you can request them from the Library.
Fiction
Freedom Ride by Sue Lawson
There's no hiding from prejudice.
Robbie knows bad things happen in Walgaree. But it's nothing to do with him. That's just the way the Aborigines have always been treated. In the summer of 1965 racial tensions in the town are at boiling point, and something headed Walgaree's way will blow things apart. It's time for Robbie to take a stand. Nothing will ever be the same.
The Grey Raider by John Flanagan
An explosive cat-and-mouse chase and high-stakes adventure across the high seas, set against the backdrop of the American Civil War.
It is October 1863, and the American Civil War is in full swing. The Union has a preponderance of men, munitions and manufacturing and the pendulum is swinging its way. But the Confederates have a powerful bargaining point in any peace negotiations: the CSS Manassas, commanded by the audacious Captain Pelle.
The Manassas is a commerce raider, searching the seas far and wide for the Union's merchant fleet. And when it finds the enemy, it sends the ships and their million-dollar cargoes straight to the ocean floor.
As the ships go down, insurance rates go sky high, and Abraham Lincoln is under extreme pressure to stop the Manassas dead. But with the Union Navy stretched to breaking point blockading the South's ports, only one ship can be spared to seek out the Confederate raider.
Enter Captain Samuel Stacy and the USS Oswego. Stacy is tenacious and bull-headed and, perhaps more importantly, has a long-standing feud with Pelle.
There is nothing he wants more than to send the ‘grey raider' to a watery grave. After all, the outcome of the war may depend on it
In My House by Alex Hourston
This unsettling debut novel tells the story of an unlikely friendship between two very different women.
In the queue for the toilets at Gatwick, a teenage girl catches 57-year-old Margaret Benson's eye in the mirror and mouths the word help. Margaret's reaction leads to the dramatic rescue of the teenager from her trafficker and Margaret becomes a hero.
But when the story gets picked up by the papers, Margaret is panicked by the publicity, as well as the strange phone calls she begins to receive. Meanwhile Anja makes contact. She wants to thank her rescuer, but she also quickly inserts herself into Margaret's lonely life. As their friendship develops, so do questions: who is Margaret hiding from, and what are Anja's true motives? And what is the cost of living a lie?
'We were all propagandists; the only differences were our goals.'
Looking for respite from her crumbling marriage and determined to stop a coal seam gas mine near her Sydney home, filmmaker Anna Broinowski finds wisdom and inspiration in the strangest of places: North Korea. Guided by the late Dear Leader Kim Jong Il's manifesto The Cinema and Directing, Broinowski, in a world first, travels to Pyongyang to collaborate with North Korea's top directors, composers and movie stars to make a powerful anti-fracking propaganda film.
Return: A Palestinian Memoir by Ghada Karmi
"The journey filled me with bitterness and grief. I remember looking down on a nighttime Tel Aviv from the windows of a place taking me back to London and thinking hopelessly, ‘flotsam and jetsam, that’s what we’ve become, scattered and divided. There’s no room for us or our memories here. And it won’t be reversed."
Having grown up in Britain following her family's exile from Palestine, doctor, author and academic Ghada Karmi leaves her adoptive home in a quest to return to her homeland. She starts work with the Palestinian Authority and gets a firsthand understanding of its bizarre bureaucracy under Israel’s occupation.
In her quest, she takes the reader on a fascinating journey into the heart of one of the world’s most intractable conflict zones and one of the major issues of our time. Visiting places she has not seen since childhood, her unique insights reveal a militarised and barely recognisable homeland, and her home in Jerusalem, like much of the West Bank, occupied by strangers. Her encounters with politicians, fellow Palestinians, and Israeli soldiers cause her to question what role exiles like her have in the future of their country and whether return is truly possible.
First Fleet Surgeon by David Hill
In a single leather-bound volume of 238 unlined pages of parchment, Surgeon Arthur Bowes Smyth describes his two-and-a-half year journey with the First Fleet from Portsmouth in England to the new colony in Australia and back. He is a frank, articulate and observant writer, and his diary, a treasure of the National Library of Australia, covers life at sea, stopovers in the slave port of Rio de Janeiro and the tropical paradise of Tahiti, and three months of early settlement in Australia.
As surgeon to more than 100 convict women on the Lady Penrhyn, Bowes Smyth gives an insight into the plight of these women, sentenced to transportation, and their children. Their voyage was marked by seasickness, miscarriage, infant deaths, a diet of salted meat and dry hardtack biscuits, and cruel punishment from thumb screws to gagging and flogging with a cat-o’-nine-tails. When they finally set foot on Australian soil, their travails did not end, being set upon by drunken sailors and crew in a ‘scene of debauchery and riot’.
Freedom Ride by Sue Lawson
There's no hiding from prejudice.
Robbie knows bad things happen in Walgaree. But it's nothing to do with him. That's just the way the Aborigines have always been treated. In the summer of 1965 racial tensions in the town are at boiling point, and something headed Walgaree's way will blow things apart. It's time for Robbie to take a stand. Nothing will ever be the same.The Grey Raider by John Flanagan
An explosive cat-and-mouse chase and high-stakes adventure across the high seas, set against the backdrop of the American Civil War.
It is October 1863, and the American Civil War is in full swing. The Union has a preponderance of men, munitions and manufacturing and the pendulum is swinging its way. But the Confederates have a powerful bargaining point in any peace negotiations: the CSS Manassas, commanded by the audacious Captain Pelle.The Manassas is a commerce raider, searching the seas far and wide for the Union's merchant fleet. And when it finds the enemy, it sends the ships and their million-dollar cargoes straight to the ocean floor.
As the ships go down, insurance rates go sky high, and Abraham Lincoln is under extreme pressure to stop the Manassas dead. But with the Union Navy stretched to breaking point blockading the South's ports, only one ship can be spared to seek out the Confederate raider.
Enter Captain Samuel Stacy and the USS Oswego. Stacy is tenacious and bull-headed and, perhaps more importantly, has a long-standing feud with Pelle.
There is nothing he wants more than to send the ‘grey raider' to a watery grave. After all, the outcome of the war may depend on it
In My House by Alex Hourston
This unsettling debut novel tells the story of an unlikely friendship between two very different women.
In the queue for the toilets at Gatwick, a teenage girl catches 57-year-old Margaret Benson's eye in the mirror and mouths the word help. Margaret's reaction leads to the dramatic rescue of the teenager from her trafficker and Margaret becomes a hero.But when the story gets picked up by the papers, Margaret is panicked by the publicity, as well as the strange phone calls she begins to receive. Meanwhile Anja makes contact. She wants to thank her rescuer, but she also quickly inserts herself into Margaret's lonely life. As their friendship develops, so do questions: who is Margaret hiding from, and what are Anja's true motives? And what is the cost of living a lie?
Non fiction
The Director is the Commander by Anna Broinowski'We were all propagandists; the only differences were our goals.'
Looking for respite from her crumbling marriage and determined to stop a coal seam gas mine near her Sydney home, filmmaker Anna Broinowski finds wisdom and inspiration in the strangest of places: North Korea. Guided by the late Dear Leader Kim Jong Il's manifesto The Cinema and Directing, Broinowski, in a world first, travels to Pyongyang to collaborate with North Korea's top directors, composers and movie stars to make a powerful anti-fracking propaganda film.Return: A Palestinian Memoir by Ghada Karmi
"The journey filled me with bitterness and grief. I remember looking down on a nighttime Tel Aviv from the windows of a place taking me back to London and thinking hopelessly, ‘flotsam and jetsam, that’s what we’ve become, scattered and divided. There’s no room for us or our memories here. And it won’t be reversed."
Having grown up in Britain following her family's exile from Palestine, doctor, author and academic Ghada Karmi leaves her adoptive home in a quest to return to her homeland. She starts work with the Palestinian Authority and gets a firsthand understanding of its bizarre bureaucracy under Israel’s occupation.In her quest, she takes the reader on a fascinating journey into the heart of one of the world’s most intractable conflict zones and one of the major issues of our time. Visiting places she has not seen since childhood, her unique insights reveal a militarised and barely recognisable homeland, and her home in Jerusalem, like much of the West Bank, occupied by strangers. Her encounters with politicians, fellow Palestinians, and Israeli soldiers cause her to question what role exiles like her have in the future of their country and whether return is truly possible.
First Fleet Surgeon by David Hill
In a single leather-bound volume of 238 unlined pages of parchment, Surgeon Arthur Bowes Smyth describes his two-and-a-half year journey with the First Fleet from Portsmouth in England to the new colony in Australia and back. He is a frank, articulate and observant writer, and his diary, a treasure of the National Library of Australia, covers life at sea, stopovers in the slave port of Rio de Janeiro and the tropical paradise of Tahiti, and three months of early settlement in Australia.
As surgeon to more than 100 convict women on the Lady Penrhyn, Bowes Smyth gives an insight into the plight of these women, sentenced to transportation, and their children. Their voyage was marked by seasickness, miscarriage, infant deaths, a diet of salted meat and dry hardtack biscuits, and cruel punishment from thumb screws to gagging and flogging with a cat-o’-nine-tails. When they finally set foot on Australian soil, their travails did not end, being set upon by drunken sailors and crew in a ‘scene of debauchery and riot’. 