The girl on the landing by Paul Torday
The novel begins as Michael, a middle-aged man of means, is dressing for dinner at a friend's country house. As he descends the grand staircase, he spots a small painting with a woman in it. During dinner, Michael comments on the painting to his hosts but they say there is no woman in the picture. This is only the first in a series of incidents that lead Michael to question his grip on reality. Suddenly his wife Elizabeth is aware that she has never really known Michael and as he changes, she sees glimpses of someone she could fall in love with. Michael, in the meantime, is disturbed by events up at his family's ancestral home in the wilds of Scotland and by a past that is threatening to destroy everything, and everyone, he has ever loved.
The kindly ones by Jonathan Littell
This Faustian story with a terrifying twist is the fictional memoir of Dr. Max Aue, a former SS intelligence officer, who has reinvented himself as a family man and owner of a lace factory in post-war France. Although Max is a totally imagined character, his world is peopled by real historical figures such as Eichmann, Himmler, Goring, Speer, Heydrich, Hoss, and Hitler himself. Massive in scope, terrifying in subject matter, and shocking in its protagonist, Littell's masterpiece is intense, hallucinatory, and terrifyingly compelling. A huge novel about the seductive enormity of evil, the ineffable horror of war, man's inhumanity and the malevolence of the Furies, this is a book that every thinking person should read and to which no one can be indifferent.
rown together again by the pursuit of vengeance, will their passion for each other reignite?
Dead people’s music by Sarah Laing
Classical is karaoke - playing covers of dead people's music - or so Wellingtonian Hannah concludes when she sabotages her London conservatorium scholarship. Unmoored from the classical discipline, Hannah turns to composing her own songs. As Hannah investigates her Jewish-refugee heritage, she also has to contend with domestic issues: is she with the right man, or should she swap stability for lust, in the form of her visiting first boyfriend? And how much longer can she live with a neurotic, junk-scavenging flatmate, on the verge of murdering another zebra fish?...
Mother’s day by Laurence Fearnley
Life is tough for 40-year-old solo mother Maggie, a home help caregiver. Her three children are all giving her a hard time, especially Bevan, who's in trouble with the police. But when she's assigned a musician in a wheelchair to care for, something new enters her life. This touching new novel from Laurence Fearnley contains many gems of warmth, affection, love and hope. It confirms her position as one of New Zealand's finest writers.
Limestone by Fiona Farrell
Clare Lacey is on a quest. In Ireland to attend an Art History conference, she sets out to find her father who walked out one day to buy a pack of cigarettes when she was a child, and disappeared. Clues lie all around on a labyrinth of walls - but the final clue lies deep within. This is a contemporary novel about inheritance, belief, art, love...and limestone.
The sonnets by Warwick Collins
Shakespeare in Love for the sonnets: a fictional tale of how Shakespeare wrote his most famous poems. In this wonderfully entertaining novel Warwick Collins imagines the circumstances that inspired 30 of the Bard's most popular sonnets. Collins has crafted a clever, witty and enjoyable novel from fragments of history. He interweaves 30 sonnets into the text in seamless fashion. The Sonnets wears its scholarship lightly and its love of Shakespeare and poetry proudly.
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Passion by Louise Bagshawe
A failed marriage between Melissa Elmett and Will Hyde did a lot of damage. She was too young, he was hurt when she left him. Years later, Melissa becomes the target for a kidnap plot, a consequence of her father's ground-breaking energy-saving invention, and Will is the only man who can protect her. Now they're on the run, thrown together again by the pursuit of vengeance, will their passion for each other reignite?
The best of times by Penny Vincenzi
A hot summer's day, a crowded motorway, a split second that changed people's lives forever. Gripping, heartbreaking, exciting and unputdownable, this new novel will be one of 2009's biggest and most enjoyable novels - from the irresistible Penny Vincenzi.
The unbearable lightness of scones by Alexander McCall Smith
The story of Bertie and his dysfunctional family continues in this fifth instalment alongside the familiar cast of favourites - Big Lou, Domenica, Angus Lordie, Cyril and others - in their daily pursuit of a little happiness. With customary charm and deftness, Alexander McCall Smith has again given us a clever, witty and utterly delightful new novel.
Long lost by Harlan Coben
The new Myron Bolitar novel. Myron hasn't heard from Terese Collins in years. Not since their affair ended without explanation. He's had no contact with her since, so her call catches him off guard. She's in Paris, she says, in trouble and only Myron can help. Caught in a foreign landscape where nothing is as it seems, he must tear apart the city - and eventually the globe - fighting for answers to unfathomable questions that will take Myron, and Harlan Coben's readers, where they have never gone before.
The virtuoso by Sonia Orchard
London, November 1945: at a bohemian party a young music student meets the charismatic concert pianist Noel Mewton-Wood. The two immediately become lovers and the affair unleashes an overwhelming passion as grand and sublime as the music they both love. This assured beautifully written debut novel is inspired by the brilliant life of Australian pianist Noel Mewton-Wood. Sonia Orchard vividly evokes the artistic world of post-war London in a novel of striking illuminations about music and imagination that is also a compelling and deeply moving love story.
The first person and other stories by Ali Smith
"The First Person and Other Stories" effortlessly appeals to our hearts, heads and funny bones. Always intellectually playful, but also very moving and funny, Smith explores the ways and whys of storytelling. Innovative, sophisticated and intelligent, the stories in "The First Person and Other Stories" are packed full of ideas, jokes, nuance and compassion. Ali Smith and the short story are made for each other.
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