New to the Paperback - Fiction - December 2008
Beethoven Was One-Sixteenth Black
Nadine Gordimer
A new collection of short stories. A woman gauges the state of her marriage by the tone of her husband's cello; a wife reads her husband's mood by the scent in the nape of his neck; a newly emigrated couple are divided by visual obsession, he with his native Budapest, she with South African suburbia. Imaginative and humourous, Gordimer illustrates the showdowns, standoffs and highlights of human intimacy and the nuances of immigration, national identity and race.more details...
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Boat
Nam Le
In 1979, Nam Le's family left Vietnam for Australia, an experience that inspires the first and last stories in The Boat. In between, however, Le's imagination lays claim to the world. The stories in The Boat range from a tourist in Tehran to a teenage hit man in Columbia; from an aging New York artist to a boy coming of age in a small Victorian fishing town; from the city of Hiroshima just before the bomb is dropped to the haunting waste of the South China Sea in the wake of another war. An astonishing collection of intimate and diverse stories.more details...
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Home
Marilynne Robinson
Robinson returns to the people and places of the award-winning Gilead in a novel that takes up the story of the wayward son Jack who, after decades away, edgily and uneasily returns home. He is the prodigal son and his family believe against all evidence, that if they love him enough, if they welcome him back, he will change and he will stay. But that is not how life really goes. Robinson's understanding of the human heart, of how families operate, of forgiveness and hope, cuts right to the soul. She writes with wisdom, intelligence and generosity.more details...
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Liver
Will Self
These new pieces from Will Self each feature the largest of our internal organs: the liver, in varying states of disease and decay. In 'Foie Humane' we go inside a Soho drinking club, the denizens of which live in a highly stylised yet emotionally dead state of excess. Tony Phillips's subterrainean Kensington flat is the setting for 'Birdy Num Num', where obsessives spend their days in a crepscular realm of cocaine and heroin. Finally, in 'Leberknodel', a terminal liver cancer patient travels to Zurich to commit assisted suicide. When she arrives, however, the cancer mysteriously goes into remission.more details...
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Netherland
Joseph O'Neill
Set amongst the anxieties and uncertainties of this new century 'Netherland' is a novel of belonging and not belonging, and the uneasy state in between. It is a novel of a marriage foundering and recuperating, and of the shallows and depths of male friendship. Hans van den Broek is living in the Chelsea Hotel, New York, after the attacks of September 11th, alone after his wife and son have returned to England. Seeking company and comfort he joins a cricket team with immigrants from the West Indies and befriends the mysterious Chuck Ramkissoon who has dreams of establishing a proper cricket ground in the unlikely setting of New York.more details...
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Slap, The
Christos Tsiolkas
At a suburban barbeque a man slaps a child who is not his own and this act has a shocking ricochet effect on a group of people, mostly friends, who are directly or indirectly influenced by the event. The slap and its consequences force them all to question their own families and the way they live, their expectations, beliefs and desires. Told from the points of view of eight people who were present at the barbecue this is a novel about the modern family and domestic life in the twenty-first century and a dissection of the growing middle class and it s aspirations and fears. An engrossing contemporary novel about what makes family , loyalty, love, truth and compromise.more details...
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Tender Morsels
Margo Lanegan
Tender Morsels is a dark and vivid story, set in two worlds and worrying at the border between them. It is a tale of journeys and transformations, penetrating the boundaries between male and female, reality and myth, conscious and unconscious, temporal and spiritual, human and beast. From girl to witch to woman. From boy to beast to man. From hell to heaven to the real world. Lanegan is known for the emotional intensity, imagination and virtuosity of her short stories, her latest collection was the wonderful Black Juice - this is her first novel.more details...
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White Tiger
Aravind Adiga
Balram Halwai is the 'White Tiger': servant, philosopher, entrepreneur, murderer... Born in a village in the dark heart of India, the son of a rickshaw puller, Balram is taken out of school by his family and put to work in a teashop. His chance to escape the prescription of his class comes when a rich village landlord hires him as a chauffeur for his son. Arriving in Delhi with his new master, Balram's re-education begins, as he learns of a new morality at the heart of a new India. Balram's journey from the darkness of village life to the light of entrepreneurial success is an amoral, irreverent and enlightening tale of modern India. This year s Booker Prize Winner.more details...
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