New to the Paperback - Fiction - February 2010
Gravel
Peter Goldsworthy
In eight stories Gravel ponders the forces that can wear down a marriage, darken desire, lead people to thwart their best intentions. A contented woman finds herself considering a bizarre sexual invitation that just days before filled her with scorn. A mediocre man is pulled into a strange dance with his stalker. A father gives his daughter a Christmas present with a disturbing history. An ugly sports parent plays a game of ridiculous chance. A young boy's music lesson offers him a discordant insight into adult behaviour. And in a primal tale about the borderline between animals and humans, death is horrifyingly not the end of the story . . .more details...
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Keeping Faith
Roger Averill
In Keeping Faith the innocence and certainties of childhood are delicately tested against the realities of adult life. Josh and Gracie grow up in a working class world centred on the values of faith and family. Both cherish their father, a lay preacher, and their mother, but for Josh the complex secrets, doubts and subtleties of the world do not allow for certainty. In adulthood he works as a labour ward attendant, his younger sister Gracie as a nurse on a remote mission station in Papua New Guinea. While Josh's conviction falters, the unfailing faith of his sister leads to tragic consequences. As events move between 1975 and 1994, between a family drama in outer suburban Melbourne and a tribal rebellion in Melanesia, faith and doubt become entwined.more details...
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Norseman's Song
Joel Deane
An ancient man with no past hails a taxi driven by a petty crim with no future. Reluctantly the pair embarks on a journey in search of legendary whaler and murderer known as the Norseman. To guide them they have only a half-remembered sea-farers tale, an ancient antique carved whalebone and a hundred year old journal bound in human skin. Deane evokes the tradition of Joseph Conrad and Edgar Allen Poe to create a violent and lyrical vision of contemporary Australia with the pace and energy of a road movie and the haunting of a nightmare.more details...
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Point Omega
Don DeLillo
In the middle of a desert a secret war advisor has gone in search of space and time. Richard Elster, 73, was a scholar and outsider, when he was called to a meeting with government war planners. They asked Elster to conceptualise their efforts – to form an intellectual framework for their troop deployments, counterinsurgency, orders for rendition. For two years he read their classified documents and attended secret meetings. At the end of his service, Elster retreats to the desert, where he is joined by a young filmmaker intent on documenting his experience. The two men sit on the deck, drinking and talking. Finley makes the case for his film. Weeks go by. And then Elster's daughter Jessie visits from New York and when a devastating event follows, all the men's talk, the accumulated meaning of conversation and isolation, is thrown into question. What is left is loss, fierce and incomprehensible.more details...
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Ransom
David Malouf
Lyrical, immediate and heartbreaking Malouf's fable engraves the epic themes of the Trojan war onto a perfect miniature - themes of war and heroics, hubris and humanity, chance and fate, the bonds between soldiers, fathers and sons, all newly burnished and brilliantly recast for our times.more details...
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Solar
Ian McEwan
Michael Beard is a Nobel prize-winning physicist whose best work is behind him. Trading on his reputation, he speaks for enormous fees and half-heartedly heads a government-backed initiative tackling global warming. A compulsive womaniser, Beard finds his fifth marriage floundering. But this time it is different: she is having the affair, and he is still in love with her. When Beard's professional and personal worlds collide in a freak accident, an opportunity presents itself for Beard to extricate himself from his marital mess, reinvigorate his career and save the world from environmental disaster. Ranging from the Arctic Circle to the deserts of New Mexico, Solar is a serious and darkly satirical novel, showing human frailty struggling with the most pressing and complex problem of our time. A story of one man's greed and self-deception.more details...
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Suicide Run, The
William Styron
The four narratives which make up this posthumous collection draw upon William Styron's experiences in the US Marine Corps, and give us an insight into the early life of one of America's great modern writers. The stories of The Suicide Run are set in the gruelling camps and sweltering training fields that marked the limbo point between civilian life and the horrors of war. Fictional yet autobiographical, the narratives of this collection focus on young men who, broiling in the claustrophobia of military life, always conscious of the imminence of action, try to maintain their sanity in the wake of their abrupt removal from normal life. Imbued with a sense of frustration and looming fear, keenly rendered in Styron's pithy and acutely observational prose, this collection is a fascinating insight into military life and the 'mysterious community of men' that comprises the US Marine Corps, and a posthumous glimpse into the mind of a mighty writer.more details...
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Trespass
Rose Tremain
Set among the hills and gorges of the Cevennes, the dark and beautiful heartland of southern France, Trespass is a thrilling novel about disputed territory, sibling love and devastating revenge. In a silent valley stands an isolated stone farmhouse, the Mas Lunel. Its owner is Aramon Lunel, an alcoholic so haunted by his violent past that he's become incapable of all meaningful action. Meanwhile, his sister, Audrun, alone in her modern bungalow within sight of the Mas Lunel, dreams of exacting retribution for the unspoken betrayals that have blighted her life. Into this closed Cevenol world comes Anthony Verey, a wealthy but disillusioned antiques dealer from London. Two worlds and two cultures collide. Ancient boundaries are crossed, taboos are broken, and a violent crime is committed. A powerful and unsettling novel.more details...
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