The Vegetarian by Han Kang; Deborah Smith (Translator)

$17.99 AUD

$19.99 (10% off)

Category: fiction a-z | Reading Level: very good

Winner of the 2016 Man Booker International Prize, The Vegetarian is a beautiful, unsettling novel about rebellion and taboo, violence and eroticism, and the twisting metamorphosis of a soul. Before the nightmares began, Yeong-hye and her husband lived an ordinary, controlled life. But the dreams--inva sive images of blood and brutality--torture her, driving Yeong-hye to purge her mind and renounce eating meat altogether. It's a small act of independence, but it interrupts her marriage and sets into motion an increasingly grotesque chain of events at home. As her husband, her brother-in-law and sister each fight to reassert their control, Yeong-hye obsessively defends the choice that's become sacred to her. Soon their attempts turn desperate, subjecting first her mind, and then her body, to ever more intrusive and perverse violations, sending Yeong-hye spiraling into a dangerous, bizarre estrangement, not only from those closest to her, but also from herself. Celebrated by critics around the world, The Vegetarian is a darkly allegorical, Kafka-esque tale of power, obsession, and one woman's struggle to break free from the violence both without and within her. ...Show more

Shuggie Bain by Douglas Stuart

$32.99 AUD

Category: fiction a-z | Reading Level: Adult

Booker Prize Winner 2020. It is 1981. Glasgow is dying and good families must grift to survive. Agnes Bain has always expected more from life. She dreams of greater things: a house with its own front door and a life bought and paid for outright (like her perfect, but false, teeth). But Agnes is abando ned by her philandering husband, and soon she and her three children find themselves trapped in a decimated mining town. As she descends deeper into drink, the children try their best to save her, yet one by one they must abandon her to save themselves. It is her son Shuggie who holds out hope the longest. Shuggie is different. Fastidious and fussy, he shares his mother's sense of snobbish propriety. The miners' children pick on him and adults condemn him as no' right. But Shuggie believes that if he tries his hardest, he can be normal like the other boys and help his mother escape this hopeless place. Douglas Stuart's Shuggie Bain lays bare the ruthlessness of poverty, the limits of love, and the hollowness of pride. A counterpart to the privileged Thatcher-era London of Alan Hollinghurst's The Line of Beauty, it also recalls the work of Édouard Louis, Frank McCourt, and Hanya Yanagihara. It is a blistering debut by a brilliant novelist with a powerful and important story to tell.   ...Show more

May We Be Forgiven by A. M. Homes

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$19.99 (10% off)

Category: fiction a-z

Winner of the 2013 Women's Prize for Fiction--A darkly comic novel of twenty-first-century domestic life by a writer who is always "compelling, devastating, and furiously good" (Zadie Smith)   Harold Silver has spent a lifetime watching his younger brother, George, a taller, smarter, and more successf ul high-flying TV executive, acquire a covetable wife, two kids, and a beautiful home in the suburbs of New York City. But Harry, a historian and Nixon scholar, also knows George has a murderous temper, and when George loses control the result is an act of violence so shocking that both brothers are hurled into entirely new lives in which they both must seek absolution.   Harry finds himself suddenly playing parent to his brother's two adolescent children, tumbling down the rabbit hole of Internet sex, dealing with aging parents who move through time like travelers on a fantastic voyage. As Harry builds a twenty-first-century family created by choice rather than biology, we become all the more aware of the ways in which our history, both personal and political, can become our destiny and either compel us to repeat our errors or be the catalyst for change.   May We Be Forgiven is an unnerving, funny tale of unexpected intimacies and of how one deeply fractured family might begin to put itself back together. ...Show more

The Discomfort of Evening (International Man Booker Prize Winner 2020) by Marieke Lucas Rijneveld; Michele Hutchison (Translator)

$29.99 AUD

Category: fiction a-z

Winner of the Man Booker International Prize 2020.   The sensational Dutch bestseller: Marieke Lucas Rijneveld's extraordinary portrait of a farming family distorted by grief. I asked God if he please couldn't take my brother Matthies instead of my rabbit. 'Amen.' Ten-year-old Jas has a unique way of ex periencing her universe: the feeling of udder ointment on her skin as protection against harsh winters; the texture of green warts, like capers, on migrating toads; the sound of 'blush words' that aren't in the Bible. But when a tragic accident ruptures the family, her curiosity warps into a vortex of increasingly disturbing fantasies - unlocking a darkness that threatens to derail them all. A bestselling sensation in the Netherlands, Marieke Lucas Rijneveld's radical debut novel is studded with images of wild, violent beauty: a world of language unlike any other.       ...Show more

A Spell of Winter by Helen Dunmore

$19.99 AUD

Category: fiction a-z | Series: Penguin Essentials Ser.

Incarcerated in the enormous country house of their grandfather - 'the man from nowhere' - they create a refuge against their family's dark secrets, and against the outside world as it moves towards the First World War. As time passes, their sibling love deepens and crosses into forbidden territory. But they are not as alone in the house as they believe . . . ...Show more

A Girl is a Half-Formed Thing by Eimear McBride

$22.99 AUD

Category: fiction a-z | Reading Level: very good

Winner of numerous literary awards including the Baileys Women's Prize for Fiction, the Geoffrey Faber Memorial Prize, and the Goldsmiths Prize, Eimear McBride's debut novel A Girl Is a Half-formed Thing plunges us into the psyche of a girl with breathtaking fury and intimacy. Adapted for the stage by A nnie Ryan for The Corn Exchange, Eimear McBride's A Girl Is a Half-formed Thing premiered at the Dublin Theatre Festival 2014. ...Show more

An American Marriage by Tayari Jones

$19.99 AUD

Category: fiction a-z

LONGLISTED FOR THE ORWELL PRIZE FOR POLITICAL FICTION, 2019 'A moving portrayal of the effects of a wrongful conviction on a young African-American couple.' - Barack Obama Newlyweds Celestial and Roy are the embodiment of the American Dream. He is a young executive, and she is an artist on the brink o f an exciting career. Until one day they are ripped apart by circumstances neither could have imagined. Roy is arrested and sentenced to twelve years for a crime Celestial knows he didn't commit.  Devastated and unmoored, Celestial finds herself struggling to hold on to the love that has been her centre, taking comfort in Andre, their closest friend. When Roy's conviction is suddenly overturned, he returns home ready to resume their life together.  A masterpiece of storytelling, An American Marriage offers a profoundly insightful look into the hearts and minds of three unforgettable characters who are at once bound together and separated by forces beyond their control. ...Show more

That Deadman Dance - A by Kim Scott

$22.99 AUD

Category: fiction a-z | Reading Level: very good

Bobby Wabalanginy never learned fear, not until he was pretty well a grown man. Sure, he grew up doing the Dead Man Dance - those stiff movements, those jerking limbs - as if he'd learned it from their very own selves; but with him it was a dance of life, a lively dance for people to do together... Told through the eyes of black and white, young and old, That Deadman Dance is a story about a fledgling Western Australian community in the early 1800s known as the 'friendly frontier'. Poetic, warm-hearted and bold, it is a story which shows that first contact did not have to lead to war. It is a story for our times. ...Show more

Behind the Scenes at the Museum by Kate Atkinson

$19.99 AUD

Category: fiction a-z

A deeply moving family story of happiness and heartbreak, Behind the Scenes at the Museum is bestselling author Kate Atkinson's award-winning literary debut. National BestsellerWinner of the Whitbread Book of the YearRuby Lennox begins narrating her life at the moment of conception, and from there takes us on a whirlwind tour of the twentieth century as seen through the eyes of an English girl determined to learn about her family and its secrets. Kate Atkinson's first novel is "a multigenerational tale of a spectacularly dysfunctional Yorkshire family and one of the funniest works of fiction to come out of Britain in years" (The New York Times Book Review). ...Show more

The Accidental by Ali Smith

$19.99 AUD

Category: fiction a-z

From the Man Booker Prize-shortlisted, Baileys Women's Prize-winning author of How to be both and the critically acclaimed Seasonal quartet 'Brilliant and engaging, frequently hilarious. . . Smith makes one look at the world afresh' Sunday Telegraph 'A beguiling page-turner... To read The Accidental i s to be excited from first to last' Independent 'Joyous' The Times The Accidental pans in on the Norfolk holiday home of the Smart family one hot summer. There a beguiling stranger called Amber appears at the door bearing all sorts of unexpected gifts, trampling over family boundaries and sending each of the Smarts scurrying from the dark into the light. A novel about the ways that seemingly chance encounters irrevocably transform our understanding of ourselves, The Accidental explores the nature of truth, the role of fate and the power of storytelling. ...Show more

The Secret Scripture by Sebastian Barry

$19.99 AUD

Category: fiction a-z

An epic story of family, love, and unavoidable tragedy from the two-time Man Booker Prize finalist. Now a major motion picture starring Rooney Mara. Sebastian Barry's latest novel, Days Without End, is now available.   Sebastian Barry's novels have been hugely admired by readers and critics, and in 2 005 his novel A Long Long Way was shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize. In The Secret Scripture, Barry revisits County Sligo, Ireland, the setting for his previous three books, to tell the unforgettable story of Roseanne McNulty. Once one of the most beguiling women in Sligo, she is now a resident of Roscommon Regional Mental Hospital and nearing her hundredth year. Set against an Ireland besieged by conflict, The Secret Scripture is an engrossing tale of one woman's life, and a poignant story of the cruelties of civil war and corrupted power. The Secret Scripture is now a film starring Rooney Mara, Eric Bana, and Vanessa Redgrave. ...Show more

How to be Both by Ali Smith

$22.99 AUD

Category: fiction a-z | Reading Level: Adult

MAN BOOKER PRIZE FINALISTWINNER OF THE BAILEYS WOMEN'S PRIZE FOR FICTIONWINNER OF THE 2014 GOLDSMITHS PRIZEWINNER OF THE 2014 COSTA NOVEL AWARD WINNER OF THE SALTIRE LITERARY BOOK OF THE YEAR AWARD   A Best Book of the Year: NPR, Financial TimesPassionate, compassionate, vitally inventive and scrupulo usly playful, Ali Smith's novels are like nothing else.Borrowing from painting's fresco technique to make an original literary double-take, How to be both is a novel all about art's versatility. It's a fast-moving genre-bending conversation between forms, times, truths and fictions. There's a Renaissance artist of the 1460s. There's the child of a child of the 1960s. Two tales of love and injustice twist into a singular yarn where time gets timeless, structural gets playful, knowing gets mysterious, fictional gets real--and all life's givens get given a second chance. ...Show more