Staff Recommended Reads

Review: After the tragic sinking of a cargo ship, one solitary lifeboat remains bobbing on the wild, blue Pacific. The only survivors from the wreck are a 16 year old boy named Pi, a hyena, a zebra (with a broken leg), a female orangutan, and a 450 pound Royal Bengal tiger. The scene is set for one of the most extraordinary works of fiction in recent years.

There is something about Ove. At first sight, he is almost certainly the grumpiest man you will ever meet. He thinks himself surrounded by idiots - neighbours who can't reverse a trailer properly, joggers, shop assistants who talk in code, and the perpetrators of the vicious coup d'etat that ousted him as Chairman of the Residents' Association. He will persist in making his daily inspection rounds of the local streets. But isn't it rare, these days, to find such old-fashioned clarity of belief and deed? Such unswerving conviction about what the world should be, and a lifelong dedication to making it just so? In the end, you will see, there is something about Ove that is quite irresistible...

Lou Clark knows lots of things. She knows how many footsteps there are between the bus stop and home. She knows she likes working in The Buttered Bun tea shop and she knows she might not love her boyfriend Patrick. What Lou doesn't know is she's about to lose her job or that knowing what's coming is what keeps her sane. Will Traynor knows his motorcycle accident took away his desire to live. He knows everything feels very small and rather joyless now and he knows exactly how he's going to put a stop to that. What Will doesn't know is that Lou is about to burst into his world in a riot of colour. And neither of them knows they're going to change the other for all time.

What if you could try out all the lives you could have lived and pick one? Would you choose differently? 'Between life and death there is a library,' she said. 'And within that library, the shelves go on for ever. Every book provides a chance to try another life you could have lived. To see how things would be if you had made other choices . . . Would you have done anything different, if you had the chance to undo your regrets?'Thirty-four-year-old Nora's life could be better. She's lonely, single and has just lost her job. Her cat dying feels like the last straw. What else is there to live for? Then she finds a library between life and death where she gets to try all the other lives she could have lived. The Midnight Library is a gloriously relatable novel about life, death and the in-between. It is about finding hope, playing chess, dumping regrets, and picking the right people around you.

The Unravelling of Samantha X. 'I wanted to go back to the real me, Amanda Goff. Yet there was just one problem. I had no idea who she was. I had no idea who I was. I hadn't been Amanda for years, decades. Samantha wasn't leaving just yet; she wasn't going to make a quiet exit. She wasn't that type of woman.' Amanda Goff was a successful journalist in London and Sydney before ditching her nine-to-five job at the age of 38 to become Samantha X, Australia's most famous escort. A bipolar diagnosis changed everything: she retired from sex work, walked away from Samantha X, and went in search of Amanda. Misfit is her third memoir - but the first written as 'herself'. Raw, honest, provocative, wise and often laugh-out-loud funny, this is an unflinching record of her journey along the bumpy path to healing and self-acceptance. Beyond confronting her bipolar disorder and addiction issues, Amanda must also contend with prejudice and judgement, lingering trauma from her earlier life, and her own crushing self-doubt. As she struggles with the realities of so-called normality, the persistent voice of Samantha X is there to remind her of a former life that offered power, money, fame - and protection from the challenges that Amanda has courageously chosen to tackle head-on. 'Written with raw honesty, extraordinary courage and non-stop brio' PROFESSOR GORDON PARKER, founder, the Black Dog Institute.

BOOKMARK BOOK OF THE YEAR 2020!'A girl's own adventure...This is Rachel Joyce's best book yet ...Exciting, moving and full of unexpected turns.' THE TIMES 'Brilliant and elegant and wise...powerful and moving...I can't recommend it enough.' JOANNA CANNON'A beautiful portrayal of female friendship in all its frailties, contradictions and strengths.' RAYNOR WINN'The perfect escape novel for our troubled times.' PATRICK GALE____________________It is 1950. In a devastating moment of clarity, Margery Benson abandons her dead-end job and advertises for an assistant to accompany her on an expedition. She is going to travel to the other side of the world to search for a beetle that may or may not exist. Enid Pretty, in her unlikely pink travel suit, is not the companion Margery had in mind. And yet together they will be drawn into an adventure that will exceed every expectation. They will risk everything, break all the rules, and at the top of a red mountain, discover their best selves.This is a story that is less about what can be found than the belief it might be found; it is an intoxicating adventure story but it is also about what it means to be a woman and a tender exploration of a friendship that defies all boundaries.

Robber Girl doesn't have a name. Or a home. But she does have a dagger. And she has Gentleman Jack. Together, they are wild.Gentleman Jack has two tasks and he needs Robber Girl with him to complete them. But when a heist to steal back Gentleman Jack's gold goes wrong, Robber Girl is trapped. Instead of sleeping out in the ravine with cliffs and caves and a river, she must stay in a cottage with keys and doorknobs and a dollhouse. A cottage that threatens to tame her.Robber Girl waits for the right moment to start her new task: she will break Gentleman Jack out of jail. But the longer Robber Girl waits, the more the cottage starts to feel like home. Torn between loyalty to Gentleman Jack and the family who have taken her in, between fighting and trusting, between being wild and being tame, Robber Girl must unravel who she was and who she is now. But when you’re a mystery even to yourself, discovering who you are might be the hardest task of them all.

'Art will wake you up. Art will break your heart. There will be glorious days. If you want eternity you must be fearless.' From The Museum of Modern LoveShe watched as the final hours of The Artist is Present passed by, sitter after sitter in a gaze with the woman across the table. Jane felt she had witnessed a thing of inexplicable beauty among humans who had been drawn to this art and had found the reflection of a great mystery. What are we? How should we live?If this was a dream, then he wanted to know when it would end. Maybe it would end if he went to see Lydia. But it was the one thing he was not allowed to do.Arky Swann is a film composer in New York separated from his wife, who has asked him to keep one devastating promise. One day he finds his way to The Atrium at MOMA and sees Marina Abramovic in The Artist is Present. The performance continues for seventy-five days and, as it unfolds, so does Arky. As he watches and meets other people drawn to the exhibit, he slowly starts to understand what might be missing in his life and what he must do.This dazzlingly original novel asks beguiling questions about the nature of art, life and love and finds a way to answer them.

Anna is not sick, but she might as well be. By age thirteen, she has undergone countless surgeries, transfusions and shots so that her older sister, Kate, can somehow fight the leukemia that has plagued her since childhood. Anna was conceived as a bone marrow match for Kate a life and a role that she has never questioned until now. Like most teenagers, Anna is beginning to ask herself who she truly is. But unlike most teenagers, she has always been defined in terms of her sister - and so Anna makes a decision that for most would be unthinkable a decision that will tear her family apart and have perhaps fatal consequences for the sister she loves. Told from multiple points of view, My Sister's Keeper examines what it means to be a good parent, a good sister, a good person. Is it morally correct to do whatever it takes to save a child's life . . . even if that means infringing upon the rights of another? Should you follow your own heart, or let others lead you?

She hears her own thick voice deep inside her ears when she says, ‘I need to know where I am.’ The man stands there, tall and narrow, hand still on the doorknob, surprised. He says, almost in sympathy, ‘Oh, sweetie. You need to know what you are.’Two women awaken from a drugged sleep to find themselves imprisoned in a broken-down property in the middle of nowhere. Strangers to each other, they have no idea where they are or how they came to be there with eight other girls, forced to wear strange uniforms, their heads shaved, guarded by two inept yet vicious armed jailers and a 'nurse'.The girls all have something in common, but what is it? What crime has brought them here from the city? Who is the mysterious security company responsible for this desolate place with its brutal rules, its total isolation from the contemporary world? Doing hard labour under a sweltering sun, the prisoners soon learn what links them: in each girl's past is a sexual scandal with a powerful man. They pray for rescue—but when the food starts running out it becomes clear that the jailers have also become the jailed. The girls can only rescue themselves.With extraordinary echoes of ‘The Handmaid's Tale’ and ‘Lord of the Flies’, ‘The Natural Way of Things’ is a compulsively readable, scarifying and deeply moving contemporary novel. It confirms Charlotte Wood's position as one of our most thoughtful, provocative and fearless truth-tellers, as she unflinchingly reveals us and our world to ourselves.