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  1. Best of 2020 (so far)

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  • Best of 2020 (so far)

Best of 2020 (so far)

Large 9780241492383

Intimations: Six Essays by Zadie Smith

$12.99 AUD

Category: Anthologies, Essays & Journals

Deeply personal and powerfully moving, a short and timely series of essays on the experience of lockdown, by one of the most clear-sighted and essential writers of our time From the critically acclaimed author of Feel Free, Swing Time, White Teeth and many more 'There will be many books written about the year 2020: historical, analytic, political and comprehensive accounts. This is not any of those. What I've tried to do is organize some of the feelings and thoughts that events, so far, have provoked in me, in those scraps of time the year itself has allowed. These are, above all, personal essays: small by definition, short by necessity. Early on in the crisis, I picked up Marcus Aurelius and for the first time in my life read his Meditations not as an academic exercise, nor in pursuit of pleasure, but with the same attitude I bring to the instructions for a flat-pack table - I was in need of practical assistance. I am no more a Stoic now than I was when I opened that ancient book, but I did come out with two invaluable intimations. Talking to yourself can be useful. And writing means being overheard.' Crafted with the sharp intelligence, wit and style that have won Zadie Smith millions of fans, and suffused with a profound intimacy and tenderness in response to these unprecedented times, Intimations is a vital work of art, a gesture of connection and an act of love - an essential book in extraordinary times. ...Show more

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Large 9780241984994

Girl, Woman, Other by Bernardine Evaristo

$19.99 AUD

Category: Fiction

Teeming with energy, humour and heart, a love song to black Britain told by twelve very different people. Grace is a Victorian orphan dreaming of the mysterious African father she will never meet. Winsome is a young Windrush bride, recently arrived from Barbados. Amma is the fierce queen of her 1980s squatters' palace. Morgan, who used to be Megan, is blowing up on social media, the newest activist-influencer on the block. Twelve very different people, mostly black and female, more than a hundred years of change, and one sweeping, vibrant, glorious portrait of contemporary Britain. Bernardine Evaristo presents a gloriously new kind of history for this old country- ever-dynamic, ever-expanding and utterly irresistible. ...Show more

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Large 9781922268006

Hurricane Season by Fernanda Melchor

$29.99 AUD

Category: Fiction

Inspired by a real event of the murder of a woman in rural Mexico, Hurricane Season takes place in a world filled with superstitions and violence--violence that poisons everything around. The Witch is dead. After a group of children playing in the murky waters of the irrigation canals discover her decom posing corpse, the village is rife with rumours and suspicions about the murder of this feared and respected woman, who had carried out the community's ritual shamanic customs. In dazzling, visceral language, Melchor extracts humanity from otherwise irredeemably brutal characters, and spins a terrifying and heartrending tale of dark suspense in a Mexican village that seems damned. 'Melchor wields a sentence like a saber. She never flinches in the bold, precise strokes of Hurricane Season. In prose as precise and breathtaking as it is unsettling, Melchor has crafted an unprecedented novel about femicide in Mexico and how poverty and extreme power imbalances lead to violence everywhere.' Idra Novey, author of Those Who Knew 'Fernanda Melchor has a powerful voice, and by powerful I mean unsparing, devastating, the voice of someone who writes with rage, and has the skill to pull it off.' Samanta Schweblin ...Show more

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Large 9781784709235

Late in the Day by Tessa Hadley

$19.99 AUD

Category: Fiction

THE SUNDAY TIMESBESTSELLER Alexandr and Christine and Zachary and Lydia have been close friends since they first met in their twenties. Thirty years later Alex and Christine are spending a leisurely summer evening at home when they receive a call from a distraught Lydia. Zach is dead. In the wake of t his profound loss, the three friends find themselves unmoored; all agree that Zach was the sanest and kindest of them all, the irreplaceable one they couldn't afford to lose. Inconsolable, Lydia moves in with Alex and Christine. But instead of loss bringing them closer, the three of them find over the following months that it warps their relationships, as old entanglements and grievances rise from the past, and love and sorrow give way to anger and bitterness. Late in the Dayexplores the tangled webs at the centre of our most intimate relationships, to expose how beneath the seemingly dependable arrangements we make for our lives lie infinite alternate configurations. 'A fine-grained novel of friendship, loss and jealousy' Sunday Times, *100 Great 21-Century Novels* ...Show more

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Large 9781760642310

On Beverley Farmer - Writers on Writers by Josephine Rowe

$17.99 AUD

Category: Writing, Language & Reference

Beverley Farmer's novels and short stories focus on loss, migration and homecoming. In this beautifully hewn essay, fellow novelist and short-story writer Josephine Rowe finds a kindred spirit and argues for a celebration and reclamation of this long-neglected Australian writer. In the Writers on Write rs series, leading authors reflect on an Australian writer who has inspired and fascinated them. Provocative and well-written, these books start a fresh conversation between past and present, shed new light on the craft of writing, and introduce some intriguing and talented authors and their work. The Writers on Writers series is published by Black Inc. in association with the University of Melbourne and State Library Victoria. ...Show more

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Large 9780241207079

Summer by Ali Smith

$29.99 AUD

Category: Fiction | Series: Seasonal Quartet

The unmissable conclusion to Ali Smith's dazzling, Man Booker-shortlisted, Seasonal Quartet. "A prose poem in praise of memory, forgiveness, getting the joke and seizing the moment.” — Dwight Garner, The New York Times In the present, Sacha knows the world’s in trouble. Her brother Robert just is trou ble. Their mother and father are having trouble. Meanwhile, the world’s in meltdown­—and the real meltdown hasn’t even started yet. In the past, a lovely summer. A different brother and sister know they’re living on borrowed time. This is a story about people on the brink of change. They’re family, but they think they’re strangers. So: Where does family begin? And what do people who think they’ve got nothing in common have in common? Summer.   ...Show more

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Large 9780349013671

What Are You Going Through by Sigrid Nunez

$29.99 AUD

Category: Fiction

The New York Times-bestselling, National Book Award-winning author of The Friend brings her singular voice to a story about the meaning of life and death, and the value of companionship. A woman describes a series of encounters she has with various people in the ordinary course of her life: an ex she ru ns into by chance at a public forum, an Airbnb owner unsure how to interact with her guests, a stranger who seeks help comforting his elderly mother, a friend of her youth now hospitalized with terminal cancer. In each of these people the woman finds a common need: the urge to talk about themselves and to have an audience to their experiences. The narrator orchestrates this chorus of voices for the most part as a passive listener, until one of them makes an extraordinary request, drawing her into an intense and transformative experience of her own. In What Are You Going Through, Nunez brings wisdom, humor, and insight to a novel about human connection and the changing nature of relationships in our times. A surprising story about empathy and the unusual ways one person can help another through hardship, her book offers a moving and provocative portrait of the way we live now.   ...Show more

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Large 9781526620033

Sorry for Your Trouble by Richard Ford

$29.99 AUD

Category: Fiction

A landmark new collection of stories from Richard Ford that showcases his brilliance, sensitivity, and trademark wit. In Sorry for Your Trouble, Pulitzer Prize winner and New York Times-bestselling author Richard Ford enacts a stunning meditation on memory, love and loss. "Displaced" returns us to a y oung man's Mississippi adolescence, and to a shocking encounter with a young Irish immigrant who recklessly tries to solace the narrator's sorrow after his father's death.  "Driving Up" follows an American woman's late-in-life journey to Canada to bid good-bye to a lost love now facing the end of this life.  "The Run of Yourself," a novella, sees a New Orleans lawyer navigating the difficulties of living beyond his Irish wife's death.  And "Nothing to Declare" follows a man and a woman's chance re-meeting in the New Orleans French Quarter, after twenty years, and their discovery of what's left of love for them. Typically rich with Ford's emotional lucidity and lyrical precision, Sorry for Your Trouble is a memorable collection from one of our greatest writers. ...Show more

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Large 9781925849592

The Fogging by Luke Horton

$29.99 AUD

Category: Fiction

A compelling tale of the slow disintegration of a relationship and the unravelling of a man. Tom and Clara are two struggling academics in their mid-thirties, who decide to take their first holiday in ten years. On the flight over to Indonesia, Tom experiences a debilitating panic attack, something he h asn't had in a long time, which he keeps hidden from Clara. At the resort, they meet Madeleine, a charismatic French woman, her Australian partner, Jeremy, and five-year-old son, Ollie, and the two couples strike up an easy friendship. The holiday starts to look up, even to Tom, who is struggling to get out of his own head. But when Clara and Madeleine become trapped in the maze-like grounds of the hotel during 'the fogging' -- a routine spraying of pesticide -- the dynamics suddenly shift between Tom and Clara, and the atmosphere of the holiday darkens. Told with equal parts compassion and irony, and brimming with observations that charm, illuminate, and devastate, The Fogging dives deep into what it means to be strong when your foundation is built on sand. ...Show more

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Large 9781742236902

Wild Nature: Walking Australia's South East Forests by John Blay

$39.99 AUD

Category: Natural History and Environment

An epic journey of discovery into the heart of a vast and contested Australian wilderness. John Blay laces up his walking boots and goes bush to explore Australia’s rugged south east forests – stretching from Canberra to the coast and on to Wilsons Promontory – in a great circle from his one-time home n ear Bermagui. In Wild Nature, the bestselling author of On Track charts the forests’ shared history, their natural history, the forest wars, the establishment of the South East Forests National Park and the threats that continue to dog their existence, including devastating bushfires. Along the way Blay asks the big questions. What do we really know about these wild forests? How did the forests come to be the way they are? What is the importance of wild nature to our civilisation?'...As well as being a story of 'spiritual regeneration', it’s also very much about the decades long 'war' between the forest industry and Aboriginal custodians and environmentalists, and about the history of this region. Reading Wild Nature is itself a deep immersion experience in the teeming tapestry of these wild places and what connects us with them.' — Fiona Capp, The Sydney Morning Herald 'This is a beautiful and enchanting book. John Blay is a superb walking companion – a naturalist, historian and philosopher whose writing glows with wit, wisdom and wonder. I savoured every word and relished every step. Wild Nature is a journal of meditation, observation and exploration, and a delicate natural and human history of the south east forests. What is nature, and how do we value it today? How did we save these special places and how might we lose them? Pick up this book and set foot in another world, a wild one nested within our own.' — Tom Griffiths ‘A brilliant natural history of the south east forests. Blay brings a lifetime of experience, knowledge and passion to every walk.’ — Inga Simpson, author of Nest, Where the Trees Were and Understory ‘Moving and vividly told. John Blay’s Wild Nature is a book like no other, written on the soles of his boots and in the wildness of his heart. At once personal, historical and political, it bears witness to the majesty and fragility of a unique Australian environment.’ — Mark McKenna ‘It’s a wonderful relief to read the work of others who are closely attached to forests and to landscapes – the kinds of books like this one written by John Blay are such an important part of the natural identity of this wonderful continent.’ — David Lindenmayer, Climate Change Institute ...Show more

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Large 9781950268085

Yi Sang: Selected Works by Yi Sang; Jack Jung (Translator); Don Mee Choi Choi (Editor)

$41.00 AUD

Category: Poetry

Formally audacious and remarkably compelling, Yi Sang's works were uniquely situated amid the literary experiments of world literature in the early twentieth century and the political upheaval of 1930s Japanese occupied Korea. While his life ended prematurely at the age of twenty-seven, Yi Sang's work e ndures as one of the great revolutionary legacies of modern Korean literature. Presenting the work of the influential Korean modernist master, this carefully curated selection assembles poems, essays, and stories that ricochet off convention in a visionary and daring response to personal and national trauma, reminding us that to write from the avant-garde is a form of civil disobedience. ...Show more

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Large 9780811229869

Angels and Saints - With a Guide to the Illustrations by Mary Wellesley by Eliot Weinberger; Anon (Notes by)

$44.95 AUD

Category: Anthologies, Essays & Journals

From a litany of angelic voices, Weinberger's lyrical meditation then turns to the earthly counterparts, the saints, their lives retold in a series of vibrant and playful capsule biographies, followed by a glimpse of the afterlife. Threaded throughout Angels and Saints are the glorious illuminated grid poems by the eighteenth-century Benedictine monk Hrabanus Maurus. These astonishingly complex, proto-"concrete" poems are untangled in a lucid afterword by the medieval scholar and historian Mary Wellesley. ...Show more

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