Library Promotions
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The Household Guide to Dying Debra Adelaide Inspired by her heroine, Isabella Beeton, Delia has made a living writing a series of hugely successful modern household guides. As the book opens, she is not yet forty, but has only a short time to live. |
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Girl in a Blue Dress Alfred Gibson’s funeral has taken place in Westminster Abbey and his wife of twenty years, Dorothea, has not been invited. Dorothea is comforted by her feisty daughter Kitty, until an invitation for a private audience with Queen Victoria arrives and she begins to examine her own life more closely. |
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Their Finest Hour and a Half Lissa Evans It’s 1940. France has fallen, and only a narrow strip of sea lies between Great Britain and invasion. The country is in peril. What’s needed (obviously) is a morale-boosting, heart-warming war film, preferably one that will appeal to the American market. |
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Blonde Roots Bernardine Evaristo Welcome to a world turned upside down. Welcome to the word of Doris. One minute she’s playing hide-and-seek with her sisters in the fields behind their cottage. The next, someone puts a bag over her head and she ends up in the stinking hold of a slave ship sailing to the New World. |
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Scottsboro Ellen Feldman Alabama, 1931. A posse stops a freight train and arrests nine black youths. Their crime: fighting with white boys. Then two white girls emerge from another freight car, and fast as anyone can say Jim Crow, the cry of rape goes up. |
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Strange Music Laura Fish In 1837, an ailing Elizabeth Barrett is confined to bed, suffering debilitating illness. Longing for a return to mobility, she corresponds with friends, endures uncomfortable remedies, writes poetry and frets over her father and siblings. |
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Love Marriage V. V. Ganeshananthan In this globe-scattered Sri Lankan family, we speak only of two kinds of marriage. The first is the Arranged Marriage. The second is the Love Marriage. In reality, there is a whole spectrum in between, but most of us spend years running away from the first towards the second. |
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Intuition Allegra Goodman Co-directors of a cancer research lab in Boston, Sandy Glass is a charismatic publicity-seeking doctor, Marion Mendelssohn an idealistic and rigorous scientist. As mentors and supervisors to their young protégés, they demand dedication and respect in a competitive environment where funding is scarce and results elusive. |
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The Wilderness Samantha Harvey It’s Jake’s birthday. He is sitting in a small plane, being flown over the landscape that has been the backdrop to his life – his childhood, his marriage, his work, his passions. Now in his early sixties, he isn’t quite the man he used to be. He has lost his wife, his son is in prison and he is about to lose his past. Jake has Alzheimer’s. |
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The Invention of Everything Else Samantha Hunt The Invention of Everything Else revolves around the twin poles of Serbian-born scientist Nikola Tesla, inventor of radio and creator of AC electricity, a notoriously marginalised genius and Louisa, a highly sensitive and imaginative young woman who encounters Tesla at the end of his life. |
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The Lost Dog Michelle de Kretser Tom Loxley is holed up in a remote cottage in the bush, trying to finish his book on Henry James, when his dog goes missing, trailing a length of orange twine tied with firm knots. The house belongs to Nelly Zhang, an elusive artist with whom Tom has become enthralled. |
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Molly Fox’s Birthday Deirdre Madden Dublin. Midsummer. While absent in New York, the celebrated actor Molly Fox has loaned her house to a playwright friend who is struggling to write a new work. Over the course of this, the longest day of the year, the playwright reflects upon her own life, Molly’s and that of their mutual friend Andrew, who she has known ever since university. But why does Molly never celebrate her own birthday, which falls upon this day? |
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A Mercy Toni Morrison In the 1680s the slave trade was still in its infancy. In the Americas, virulent religious and class divisions, prejudice and oppression were rife, providing the fertile soil in which slavery and race hatred were planted and took root. |
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The Russian Dreambook of Colour and Flight Gina Oschner In her dusty provincial museum of fake exhibits lovingly crafted from cardboard, wire and glue, Tanya dreams of Russian art’s colours and wonders when Yuri will stop fishing long enough to notice how she adores him, while she tries the zero-one-zero diet in order to meet Aeroflot’s maximum waist requirements for trainee cabin-crew. |
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Home Marilynne Robinson Jack – prodigal son of the Broughton family, godson and namesake of John Ames (main protagonist of Robinson’s previous novel), gone twenty years, has returned home looking for refuge and to try to make peace with a past littered with trouble and pain. A bad boy from childhood, an alcoholic who cannot hold down a job, Jack is perpetually at odds with his surroundings and with his traditionalist father, though he remains Broughton’s most beloved child. |
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Evening Is The Whole Day Preeta Samarasan When the family’s servant girl, Chellam, is dismissed from the Big House, it is only the latest in a series of losses that have shaken six-year-old Aasha’s life. Her grandmother has died under mysterious circumstances and her older sister has disappeared for a new life abroad. Her parents, meanwhile, seem to be hiding something – from themselves and from each other. |
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Burnt Shadows Kamila Shamsie In a prison cell in the US, a man stands trembling, naked, fearfully waiting to be shipped to Guantánamo Bay. How did it come to this? August 9th 1945, Nagasaki. Hiroko Tanaka steps out onto her veranda, taking in the view of the terraced slopes leading up to the sky. Wrapped in a kimono with three black cranes swooping across the back, she is twenty-one, in love with the man she is to marry, Konrad Weiss. |
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American Wife Curtis Sittenfeld On one of the most important days of her husband’s presidency, Alice Blackwell considers the strange and unlikely path that has led them to the White House. Thrust into a position she did not seek – one of power and influence, privilege and responsibility – Alice must face contradictions years in the making: how can she at once love and fundamentally disagree with her husband? |
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The Flying Troutmans Miriam Toews Hattie is living in Paris, city of romance, but has just been dumped by her boyfriend. Min, her sister back in Canada, is going through a particularly dark period. And Min’s two kids, Logan and Thebes, are not talking and talking way too much, respectively. |
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The Personal History of Rachel DuPree Ann Weisgarber It is 1917 in the South Dakota Badlands and the summer has been hard. Fourteen years have passed since Rachel and Isaac DuPree left Chicago to stake a claim in this unforgiving land. Isaac, a former Buffalo Soldier, is fiercely proud: black families are rare in the West, and black farmers even rarer. |
