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Intermezzo (Special edition hardback)
An exquisitely moving story about grief, love and family, from the global phenomenon Sally Rooney.
Sally Rooney
Special edition featuring endpapers and exclusive short story by the author. From the author of the multimillion-copy bestseller Normal People, an exquisitely moving story about grief, love and family. Aside from the fact that they are brothers, Peter and Ivan Koubek seem to have little in common. Peter is a Dublin lawyer in his thirties - successful, competent and apparently unassailable. But in the wake of their father's death, he's medicating himself to sleep and struggling to manage his relationships with two very different women - his enduring first love Sylvia, and Naomi, a college student for whom life is one long joke. Ivan is a twenty-two-year-old competitive chess player. He has always seen himself as socially awkward, a loner, the antithesis of his glib elder brother. Now, in the early weeks of his bereavement, Ivan meets Margaret, an older woman emerging from her own turbulent past, and their lives become rapidly and intensely intertwined. For two grieving brothers and the people they love, this is a new interlude - a period of desire, despair and possibility - a chance to find out how much one life might hold inside itself without breaking. -
The Season
Brilliant new non-fiction from the author of This House of Grief, Monkey Grip, and The Children's Bach
Helen Garner
Garner's first new work in a decade is a tender portrayal of the relationship between grandmother and grandson, and of that moment on the cusp of adulthood when a boy is both child and man. I pull up at the kerb. I love this park they train in. I must have walked the figure-of-eight around its ovals hundreds of times, at dawn, winter and summer, to throw the ball for Dozer, our red heeler, but he's buried now, in the backyard, under the crepe myrtle near the chook pen. The boy jumps out with his footy and trots away, bouncing it. Boy? Look at him. He's five foot eleven. The last of my three grandkids. This year he's in the Under 16s. It's footy season in Melbourne, and Helen Garner is following her grandson's suburban team. She turns up not only at every game (give or take), but at every training session, shivering on the sidelines in the dark, fascinated by the spectacle. She's a passionate Western Bulldogs supporter (with a rather shaky grasp of the rules) and a great admirer of the players and the epic theatre of the game. But this is something more than that. It is a chance to connect with her youngest grandchild, to be close to him in his last moments as a child and in his headlong rush into manhood. To witness his triumphs and defeats, to fear for his safety in battle, to gasp and to cheer for the team as it fights its way towards the finals. Garner's sharp eye, wit and warm humour bring the team and the season to life, as she documents this pivotal moment, both as part of the story and as silent witness. It's a reflection on masculinity, on the nobility, grace and grit of team spirit and the game's power to enthrall. PRAISE- 'One of Australia's foremost authors, admired by writers as different as Raymond Carver and Elizabeth Jolley.' Independent 'Not long ago I read Helen Garner for the first time and was so stunned that I wanted to run around the block; how strange, how wonderful, that a book can still make me feel that way.' Rumaan Alam 'There are very few writers that I admire more than Helen Garner.' David Nicholls 'A voice of great honesty and energy.' Anne Enright -
An epic novel of determination, survival, and the limits of the human spirit. This is Tim Winton as you've never read him before. Two fugitives, a man and a child, drive all night across a stony desert. As dawn breaks, they roll into an abandoned mine site. From the vehicle they survey a forsaken place - middens of twisted iron, rusty wire, piles of sun-baked trash. They're exhausted, traumatised, desperate now. But as a refuge, this is the most promising place they've seen. The child peers at the field of desolation. The man thinks to himself, this could work. Problem is, they're not alone. So begins a searing, propulsive journey through a life whose central challenge is not simply a matter of survival, but of how to maintain human decency as everyone around you falls ever further into barbarism.
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Six astronauts rotate in their spacecraft contemplating the world below Six astronauts rotate in their spacecraft contemplating the world below 'A slim, profound study of intimate human fears set against epic vistas' GUARDIAN 'Stunning... An uplifting book' SUNDAY TIMES A team of astronauts in the International Space Station collect meteorological data, conduct scientific experiments and test the limits of the human body. But mostly they observe. Together they watch their silent blue planet, circling it sixteen times, spinning past continents and cycling through seasons, taking in glaciers and deserts, the peaks of mountains and the swells of oceans. Endless shows of spectacular beauty witnessed in a single day. Yet although separated from the world they cannot escape its constant pull. News reaches them of the death of a mother, and with it comes thoughts of returning home. They look on as a typhoon gathers over an island and people they love, in awe of its magnificence and fearful of its destruction. The fragility of human life fills their conversations, their fears, their dreams. So far from earth, they have never felt more part - or protective - of it. They begin to ask, what is life without earth? What is earth without humanity?
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The New York Times bestselling author of The First Bad Man returns with an irreverently sexy, tender, hilarious and literary novel about a woman upending her life A semi-famous artist announces her plan to drive cross-country from LA to NY. Thirty minutes after leaving her husband and child at home, she spontaneously exits the freeway, beds down in a nondescript motel and immerses herself in a temporary reinvention that turns out to be the start of an entirely different journey.Miranda July's second novel confirms the brilliance of her unique approach to fiction. With July's wry voice, perfect comic timing, unabashed curiosity about human intimacy and palpable delight in pushing boundaries, All Fours tells the story of one woman's quest for a new kind of freedom. Part absurd entertainment, part tender reinvention of the sexual, romantic and domestic life of a 45-year-old female artist, All Fours transcends expectations while excavating our beliefs about life lived as a woman. Once again, July hijacks the familiar and turns it into something new and thrillingly, profoundly alive.
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In a small back alley in Tokyo, there is a café which has been serving carefully brewed coffee for more than one hundred years. But this coffee shop offers its customers a unique experience: the chance to travel back in time. In Before the Coffee Gets Cold, we meet four visitors, each of whom is hoping to make use of the café's time-travelling offer, in order to: confront the man who left them, receive a letter from their husband whose memory has been taken by early onset Alzheimer's, to see their sister one last time, and to meet the daughter they never got the chance to know. But the journey into the past does not come without risks: customers must sit in a particular seat, they cannot leave the café, and finally, they must return to the present before the coffee gets cold ... Toshikazu Kawaguchi's beautiful, moving story explores the age-old question: what would you change if you could travel back in time? More importantly, who would you want to meet, maybe for one last time?
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Irresistibly funny, wise and thought-provoking, The Bee Sting is a tour de force about family, fortune, and the struggle to be a good person when the world is falling apart The Barnes family is in trouble. Dickie's once-lucrative car dealership is going under, and while his wife is frantically selling off her jewellery on eBay, he's busy building an apocalypse-proof bunker in the woods. Meanwhile their teenage daughter is veering off the rails, in thrall to a toxic friendship, and her little brother is falling into the black hole of the internet... Where did it all go wrong? The present is in crisis but the causes lie deep in the past. How long can this unhappy family wait before they have to face the truth? And if the story has already been written, is there still time to find a happy ending?
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The cult Japanese bestseller about a female gourmet cook and serial killer and the journalist intent on cracking her case, inspired by a true story. There are two things that I can simply not tolerate: feminists and margarine. Gourmet cook Manako Kajii sits in Tokyo Detention Centre convicted of the serial murders of lonely businessmen, who she is said to have seduced with her delicious home cooking. The case has captured the nation's imagination but Kajii refuses to speak with the press, entertaining no visitors. That is, until journalist Rika Machida writes a letter asking for her recipe for beef stew and Kajii can't resist writing back. Rika, the only woman in her news office, works late each night, rarely cooking more than ramen. As the visits unfold between her and the steely Kajii, they are closer to a masterclass in food than journalistic research. Rika hopes this gastronomic exchange will help her soften Kajii but it seems that she might be the one changing. With each meal she eats, something is awakening in her body, might she and Kaji have more in common than she once thought? Inspired by the real case of the convicted con woman and serial killer, "The Konkatsu Killer", Asako Yuzuki's Butter is a vivid, unsettling exploration of misogyny, obsession, romance and the transgressive pleasures of food in Japan.
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Every relationship has one beginning. This one has two endings. Andy loves Jen. Jen loved Andy. And he can't work out why she stopped. Now he is. . . 1. Without a home 2. Waiting for his stand-up career to take off 3. Wondering why everyone else around him seems to have grown up while he wasn't looking Set adrift on the sea of heartbreak at a time when everything he thought he knew about women, and flat-sharing, and his friendships has transformed beyond recognition, Andy clings to the idea of solving the puzzle of their broken relationship. Because if he can find the answer to that, then maybe Jen can find her way back to him. Andy still has a lot to learn, not least his ex-girlfriend's side of the story.
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RecipeTin Eats: Tonight
Dinners for every night of the week from Australia's favourite cook
Nagi Maehashi
DINNERS for every night of the week from Australia's favourite cook Australia's favourite home cook, Nagi Maehashi, is back to solve the perennial problem of what's for dinner tonight ... and every night. Following on from her record-breaking first cookbook, Dinner, Nagi brings us Tonight with more than 150 brand-new foolproof, flavour-packed recipes, 800 variations on those recipes and 3000 possible combinations that match formulas (including the world-famous Charlie sauce) with different ingredients. There are crave-worthy crowd-pleasers - try slow-baked Italian meatballs in a rich tomato sauce with bubbling melted cheese or fall-apart Asian chicken cooked in a sticky-sweet soy glaze. Some dinners can be cooked in 20 minutes, and others can be made using only pantry staples. For high-impact guest-impressing, turn to Sunday suppers - the Vietnamese pulled pork is a festival of flavour - while the sweet chapter delivers on the promise of maximum decadence. With a stunning photo and link to a how-to video for each recipe - and plenty of guest appearances from Australia's most loved golden retriever, Dozer! - this is a book for every Australian kitchen, for every level of cooking ability, for every budget, for every set of taste buds, and for every single night of the week. -
The no-bullshit, no-frills guide to your twenties, from Cheek Media Co. Founder and Bite Back author, Hannah Ferguson. Weaving deeply personal stories with spot-on opinions and advice about sex, friendship, family, career and beyond, this is Dolly Alderton's Everything I Know About Love meets Clare Bowditch's Your Own Kind of Girl for the next generation. A vulnerable exploration of modern womanhood that weaves deeply personal stories with opinions and advice on sex, friendship, family, career and beyond. This part-memoir, part feminist-manifesto meets women where they are and as they are. Hannah exposes and celebrates the messy, honest and insular parts of ourselves in a book designed to feel like a late-night conversation with your best friend - one that will make you laugh, cry and that you'll never want to end.
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Ottolenghi's first brand-new major cookbook since the era-defining Ottolenghi SIMPLE and Ottolenghi FLAVOUR. With over 100 evocative, irresistible recipes alongside stories of childhood and home. This is comfort food, Ottolenghi-style. In his much-anticipated new book, Yotam Ottolenghi brings his inspiring, flavour-forward approach to comfort cooking, delivering new classics that taste of home. A bowl of pasta becomes Caramelised Onion Orecchiette with Hazelnuts & Crispy Sage, a warming soup is Cheesy Bread Soup with Savoy Cabbage & Cavolo Nero, and a plate of mash is transformed into Garlicky Aligot Potato with Leeks & Thyme. Weaving memories of childhood and travel with over 100 irresistible recipes, Ottolenghi COMFORT is a celebration of food and home - of the connections we make as we cook, and pass on from generation to generation.
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'Paul Lynch is peerless' Donal Ryan, author of Strange Flowers An Irish Times 'Book to Look Forward to in 2023' A fearless portrait of a society on the brink as a mother faces a terrible choice, from an internationally award-winning author On a dark, wet evening in Dublin, scientist and mother-of-four Eilish Stack answers her front door to find the GNSB on her step. Two officers from Ireland's newly formed secret police are here to interrogate her husband, a trade unionist. Ireland is falling apart. The country is in the grip of a government turning towards tyranny and Eilish can only watch helplessly as the world she knew disappears. When first her husband and then her eldest son vanish, Eilish finds herself caught within the nightmare logic of a collapsing society. How far will she go to save her family? And what or who is she willing to leave behind? Exhilarating, terrifying and propulsive, Prophet Song is a work of breathtaking originality, offering a devastating vision of a country at war and a deeply human portrait of a mother's fight to hold her family together.
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With the heart and humour of The Thursday Murder Club combined with the international mystery of The Da Vinci Code, welcome to the blockbusting new series from the biggest new fiction author of the decade, Richard Osman. The first in a new series from the record-breaking phenomenon and globally bestselling author Richard Osman, starring a brand-new detective duo.
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**'Exquisite.' Damon Galgut 'Masterly.' _The Times_ 'Miraculous.' _Herald_ 'Astonishing.' Colm Toibin 'Stunning.' _Sunday Independent_ 'Absolutely beautiful.' Douglas Stuart** **A Book of the Year in _The Times_ and _The New Statesman_** It is 1985, in an Irish town. During the weeks leading up to Christmas, Bill Furlong, a coal and timber merchant, faces into his busiest season. As he does the rounds, he feels the past rising up to meet him - and encounters the complicit silences of a people controlled by the Church. 'A genuine once-in-a-generation writer.' _The Times_ '[A] snowglobe of a story that fits a whole bustling, striving, yearning world into 114 finely wrought pages.' _Sunday Times_ 'Powerful and affecting and very timely . . . deeply moving.' Hilary Mantel 'Stunning . . . A haunting, hopeful masterpiece.' Sinead Gleeson 'Remarkable . . . Truly exquisite.' _Daily Telegraph_ 'A restrained and intensely moral book, full of hope and love.' _Observer_ 'Marvellous - exact and icy and loving all at once.' Sarah Moss
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A hopeful, healing novel about new friendships, old loves, and the very human desire to leave a mark on the world - from the Pulitzer Prize-winning, Booker Prize shortlisted author of My Name is Lucy Barton It's autumn in Maine, and the town lawyer Bob Burgess has become enmeshed in an unfolding murder investigation, defending a lonely, isolated man accused of killing his mother. He has also fallen into a deep and abiding friendship with the acclaimed writer, Lucy Barton, who lives down the road in a house by the sea with her ex-husband, William. Together, Lucy and Bob go on walks and talk about their lives, their fears and regrets, and what might have been. Lucy, meanwhile, is finally introduced to the iconic Olive Kitteridge, now living in a retirement community on the edge of town. Together, they spend afternoons in Olive's apartment, telling each other stories. Stories about people they have known - "unrecorded lives," Olive calls them - reanimating them, and, in the process, imbuing their lives with meaning. Brimming with empathy and pathos, TELL ME EVERYTHING is Elizabeth Strout operating at the height of her powers, illuminating the ways in which our relationships keep us afloat. As Lucy says, "Love comes in so many different forms, but it is always love."
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Beginning at a love hotel by Japan's Inland Sea and ending by a river in Tasmania, Question 7 is about the choices we make about love and the chain reaction that follows. By way of H. G. Wells and Rebecca West's affair through 1930s nuclear physics to Flanagan's father working as a slave labourer near Hiroshima when the atom bomb is dropped, this genre-defying daisy chain of events reaches fission when Flanagan as a young man finds himself trapped in a rapid on a wild river not knowing if he is to live or to die. At once a love song to his island home and to his parents, this hypnotic melding of dream, history, literature, place and memory is about how reality is never made by realists and how our lives so often arise out of the stories of others and the stories we invent about ourselves.
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Winner of the 2024 Miles Franklin Literary Award Winner of the 2024 Stella Prize Winner of the 2024 ALS Gold Medal Praiseworthy is an epic set in the north of Australia, told with the richness of language and scale of imagery for which Alexis Wright has become renowned. In a small town dominated by a haze cloud, which heralds both an ecological catastrophe and a gathering of the ancestors, a crazed visionary seeks out donkeys as the solution to the global climate crisis and the economic dependency of the Aboriginal people. His wife seeks solace from his madness in following the dance of butterflies and scouring the internet to find out how she can seek repatriation for her Aboriginal/Chinese family to China. One of their sons, called Aboriginal Sovereignty, is determined to commit suicide. The other, Tommyhawk, wishes his brother dead so that he can pursue his dream of becoming white and powerful. This is a novel which pushes allegory and language to its limits, a cry of outrage against oppression and disadvantage, and a fable for the end of days. Accompanied by new editions of Wright's classic novels, Carpentaria and The Swan Book, to be released by Giramondo in May 2023. Also Winner of the 2023 Queensland Literary Awards: The University of Queensland Fiction Book Award
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Stylish and open-hearted, this is a very different kind of love story, elevated and energised by being set in the world of creativity and video gaming * RADIO 2 BOOKCLUB PICK * NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER * JIMMY FALLON BOOK CLUB PICK * GRAZIA SUMMER READING PICK * 'I just love this book and I hope you love it too' JOHN GREEN, TikTok 'I recently read this book and loved it ' CELESTE NG, Washington Post This is not a romance, but it is about love Two kids meet in a hospital gaming room in 1987. One is visiting her sister, the other is recovering from a car crash. The days and months are long there. Their love of video games becomes a shared world -- of joy, escape and fierce competition. But all too soon that time is over. When the pair spot each other eight years later in a crowded train station, they are catapulted back to that moment. The spark is immediate, and together they get to work on what they love - making games to delight, challenge and immerse players, finding an intimacy in digital worlds that eludes them in their real lives. Their collaborations make them superstars. This is the story of the perfect worlds Sadie and Sam build, the imperfect world they live in, and of everything that comes after success- Money. Fame. Duplicity. Tragedy. Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow takes us on a dazzling imaginative quest as it examines the nature of identity, creativity, disability, failure, the redemptive possibilities in play and, above all, our need to connect- to be loved and to love. 'I cannot recommend it highly enough' HANK GREEN, Instagram 'A beautifully wrought saga of human connection and the creative process, of love and all of its complicated levels' ERIN MORGENSTERN, author of The Night Circus 'You don't have to be a gamer to enjoy this story about two brilliant young game designers growing famous, then growing apart' Observer 'A novel that treasures the act of play and holds it sacred' Guardian 'You needn't be a gamer to be charmed by this immersive tale of friendship, creativity and life's messy wonders' Mail on Sunday ' An engrossing, delightful novel' Financial Times
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A novel of enormous wit and profound emotional resonance from one of the world's finest writers. Eilis Lacey is Irish, married to Tony Fiorello, a plumber and one of four Italian American brothers, all of whom live in neighboring houses on a cul-de-sac in Lindenhurst, Long Island, with their wives and children and Tony's parents. It is the spring of 1976 and Eilis, now in her forties with two teenage children, has no one to rely on in this still-new country. One day, an Irishman comes to the door asking for Eilis by name. He tells her that his wife is pregnant with Tony's child and that when the baby is born, he will not raise it but will leave it with her. Eilis has choices to make, and what she chooses to do after this shattering news make this one of Toibin's most riveting and emotional novels to date.
ISBNs in this list
9780571393374, 9781922790750, 9781761344893, 9781529922936, 9781838853457, 9781529029581, 9780241984406, 9780008679231, 9780241993163, 9781761561832, 9781923046634, 9781785038914, 9780861545896, 9780241608371, 9780571368709, 9780241634356, 9781761343483, 9781922725325, 9781529115543, 9781761267734, 9781035031245, 9781786330895, 9780008623005, 9781760785031, 9780571381364, 9781761560941, 9781911717096, 9781408864425, 9781786583239, 9781760762650, 9781783786138, 9781847941831, 9781761263330, 9781743797761, 9781838858636, 9781804990926, 9780241988268, 9781761429767, 9780349437019, 9781760630492, 9781760980139, 9781787304475, 9781761069499, 9781923058149, 9781922616777, 9781460760147, 9780241982105, 9781761620058, 9781846276033, 9781761428043, 9780143787112, 9780571376483, 9780008421793, 9780241683132, 9780241694909, 9781761069390, 9781460759837, 9781760644406, 9781781259344, 9781922616500, 9781922928023, 9780241435021, 9780571379149, 9781760762629, 9781529936711, 9781922790941, 9781800818026, 9780571382019, 9780702268489, 9781526657947, 9781761151408, 9781743799314, 9781760763114, 9781399726351, 9781526605399, 9781761048623, 9780645869033, 9781923022829, 9781760644000, 9780141978611, 9780571334650, 9780008501853, 9781784971571, 9781805223474, 9780340960196, 9780008600303, 9780140167771, 9780060959470, 9781760643973, 9781804091043, 9781787702226, 9781760644413, 9781741179279, 9781922616845, 9781399614863, 9781460765357, 9781761268281, 9781787334380, 9781526675170, 9781035038534



















