AustLit

'An unforgettable and sweeping family saga from Markus Zusak, the storyteller who gave us the extraordinary bestseller The Book Thief.

'Bridge of Clay is about a boy who is caught in the current - of destroying everything he has, to become all he needs to be. He's a boy in search of greatness, as a cure for memory and tragedy. He builds a bridge to save his family, but also to save himself. It's an attempt to transcend humanness, to make a single, glorious moment:

'A miracle and nothing less.'

Source: Publisher's blurb.

'This is a story of right and wrong, and how sometimes they look the same ...

'1926. Tom Sherbourne is a young lighthouse keeper on a remote island off Western Australia. The only inhabitants of Janus Rock, he and his wife Isabel live a quiet life, cocooned from the rest of the world.

'One April morning a boat washes ashore carrying a dead man and a crying infant - and the path of the couple's lives hits an unthinkable crossroads.

'Only years later do they discover the devastating consequences of the decision they made that day - as the baby's real story unfolds...' (From the publisher's website.)

'No one is safe. The world has descended into chaos. On the surface, everything looks the same - yet the unthinkable has happened. The dead have risen...

'Everyone is haunted by a relative, friend, spouse or stranger and these spirits are unshakeable, silent and watching. Governments the world over fail to deal with the epidemic. Crime is rife and murders commonplace. But who is responsible: the ghosts or the people?

'Finding out is where Detective Oscar Mariani comes in, although it's nearly impossible to run a department when you can't even see half the suspects. His strike rate is embarrassingly low.

'Then he stumbles onto a case that cuts through his apathy. A ritualistic, brutal serial killer is at work murdering young women, and the evidence implicates those in high places. If Mariani can solve the case, and keep himself alive, he may be able to exorcise his own ghostly shadow, a dead young man who just might have a message Mariani needs to hear.

'A gripping mix of police procedural and supernatural thriller, The Broken Ones is a knuckle-whitening ride.'

Source: Publisher's blurb.

From adolescent pen pal in the suburbs of Australia to prize-winning foreign correspondent, Geraldine Brooks presents an intimate and captivating memoir. Born on Bland Street in a working-class neighborhood of Sydney, Australia, Geraldine Brooks longs to discover the vivid place where history happens and culture comes from. As a means of escaping the world around her, she enlists pen pals from around the globe who offer her a window on the hazards of adolescence in the Middle East, Europe, and America. With the aid of her letters, Brooks turns her bedroom into the bridge of the Starship Enterprise, the barricades of Parisian student protests, the swampy fields of an embattled kibbutz.

Brooks goes from the protected environment of a Catholic girls school to the University of Sydney, eventually renting her own flat near the bustling Sydney harbor. She hires on as an intern at The Sydney Morning Herald and then wins a scholarship to the Graduate School of Journalism at Columbia University in New York City, where she begins her career as a foreign correspondent. As a writer for The Wall Street Journal, Brooks reports on wars and famines in the Middle East, Bosnia, and Africa, but she never forgets her earlier foreign correspondence.

Back in Australia to attend her dying father, she stumbles on her old letters in her parents' basement, and embarks on a journey that tales her around the world on the most meaningful assignment of her career. Her search leads her through Israeli moshavim, Arab souks, medieval French hill towns, Martha's Vineyard fishing shacks, and Manhattan nightclubs. One by one, she finds men and women whose lives have been shaped by war and hatred, by fame and notoriety, and by the ravages of a mysterious and tragic mental illness.

It is only from the distance of foreign lands and against the background of alien lives that Brooks finally sees her homeland and her own life clearly. Candid, thoughtful, and compelling, Foreign Correspondence speaks to the unquiet heart of every girl who has ever yearned to become a woman of the world. (Publisher description)

'When Grace married the genial and handsome Captain Leo Waterhouse in Australia in 1943, they were young, in love - and at war. Like many other young men and women, they were ready, willing and able to put the war effort first. They never seriously doubted that they would come through unscathed. But Leo never returned from a commando mission masterminded by his own hero figure, an eccentric and charismatic man who inspired total loyalty from those under his command. The world moved on to new alliances, leaving Grace, like so many widows, to bear the pain of losing the love of her life and wonder what it had all been for. Sixty years on, Grace is still haunted by the tragedy of her doomed hero when the real story of his ill-fated secret mission is at last unearthed. As new fragments of her hero's story emerge, Grace is forced to keep revising her picture of what happened to Leo and his fellow commandoes - until she learns about the final piece in the jigsaw, and the ultimate betrayal.' (Publisher's blurb)

'It is 1939. Nazi Germany. The country is holding its breath. Death has never been busier, and will become busier still. Liesel Meminger and her younger brother are being taken by their mother to live with a foster family outside Munich. Liesel's father was taken away on the breath of a single, unfamiliar word - Kommunist - and Liesel sees the fear of a similar fate in her mother's eyes. On the journey, Death visits the young boy, and notices Liesel. It will be the first of many near encounters. By her brother's graveside, Liesel's life is changed when she picks up a single object, partially hidden in the snow. It is The Gravedigger's Handbook, left there by accident, and it is her first act of book thievery. So begins a love affair with books and words, as Liesel, with the help of her accordion-playing foster father, learns to read. Soon she is stealing books from Nazi book-burnings, the mayor's wife's library, wherever there are books to be found. But these are dangerous times. When Liesel's foster family hides a Jewish fist-fighter in their basement, Liesel's world is both opened up, and closed down.'

[Source: Libraries Australia. Sighted 30/10/08]

'At eighteen, Rosemary arrives in New York from Tasmania with little more than her love of books and an eagerness to explore the city she's read so much about. The moment she steps into the Arcade bookstore, she knows she has found a home. The gruff owner, Mr. Pike, gives her a job sorting through huge piles of books and helping the rest of the staff - a group as odd and idiosyncratic as the characters in a Dickens novel.

'There's Pearl, the loving, motherly transsexual who runs the cash register; Oscar, who shares his extensive, eclectic knowledge with Rosemary, but furiously rejects her attempts at a more personal relationship; and Arthur Pick, who supervises the art section and demonstrates a particular interest in photography books featuring naked men. The store manager Walter Geist is an albino, a lonely figure even within the world of the Arcade. When Walter's eyesight begins to fail, Rosemary becomes his assistant. And so it is Rosemary who first reads the letter from someone seeking to "place" a lost manuscript by Herman Melville. Mentioned in Melville's personal correspondence but never published, the work is of inestimable value, and proof of its existence brings the simmering ambitions and rivalries of the Arcade staff to a boiling point.

'Based on actual documents the author found while doing research on Melville, The Secret of Lost Things is at once a literary adventure that captures the excitement of discovering a long-lost manuscript, and an evocative portrait of life in a bookshop.' (Publisher's blurb)

'At Zephyr Holdings, no one has ever seen the CEO. The floors are numbered in reverse, the Mission Statement could mean almost anything, and the beautiful receptionist is paid twice as much as anybody else, but appears to do no work. One of the sales reps uses relationship books as sales manuals, and another is on the warpath because somebody stole his doughnut. In other words, it's a typical big company. Or at least, that's what everyone thinks, until fresh- faced employee Jones - too new to understand you just don't ask some questions - starts investigating. Soon Jones uncovers the company's secret: the answer to everything, what Zephyr Holdings really does, and why every manager carries a copy of the Omega Management System. It plunges him into a maelstrom of love, loyalty, management, and corporate immorality - and whether he can get out again. Now that's a good question. In the tradition of William Gibson, Joseph Heller, and Douglas Coupland, Company is a biting, incisive, and delightful satire of corporate culture.' (Publisher's blurb).

'Mickey Carlyle disappeared, in a building with only five floors and eleven flats ? How is this possible? Everyone knows that Mickey Carlyle is dead and a man is in prison for her murder, except Detective Inspector Vincent Ruiz, who cannot stop searching for her and will not give up hope that she is still alive. Vincent is found one night, shot and with a picture of Mickey in his pocket; he seems to have amnesia. After being accused of faking amnesia and under investigation by his colleagues he retraces his steps, and relives that night with the help of a psychologist. Facts, not memories will tell him what happened to Mickey Carlisle. ' (Publisher's blurb)

'For more than a century, Americans and Britons have been arriving hopefully in Paris.We'll Always Have Paris is a personal view of Paris as it appeared to the emotionally and intellectually hungry of the world. It explores the old brothels - temples of sensuality in 18th century Paris - and an erotic bookshop.'

Source: Publisher's blurb.

'Renowned psychologist Joseph O'Loughlin has it all-a thriving practice, a devoted, beautiful, fiercely intelligent wife, and a lovely young daughter. But when he's diagnosed with Parkinson's, O'Loughlin begins to dread the way his exceptional mind has been shackled to a failing body, and the cracks in his perfect existence start to show.

'At first, O'Loughlin is delighted to be called in to a high-profile murder investigation, hoping his extraordinary abilities at perception will help bring a killer to justice. But when O'Loughlin recognizes the victim as one of his former patients, an emotionally disturbed young woman who nearly brought ruin upon him, O'Loughlin hesitates-a fateful decision that soon places O'Loughlin at the top of the lists of both a bullish detective, and a diabolical killer.' (Publication summary)

'A memoir of life and death on the Burma-Thailand Railway.

Four and a half days after being transported out of Singapore in a steel goods train in October 1942, prisoner of war Denys Peek found himself in Siam, and a part of the labour force destined for the project that was later to be known as the Thai-Burma death railway.

Together with his brother, Ron, and contingents from the Australian and British armies and Volunteer units, among others, Denys spent the duration of the war in over fifteen different work and 'hospital' camps on the railway where over 20,000 prisoners of war and uncounted slave labourers met their deaths. Told in the present tense, One Fourteenth of an Elephant is a haunting, evocative and deeply moving testimony to the suffering and the bravery of those who lived and died on the railway. Against a backdrop of inhumanity and brutality, the greatest examples of humanity and courage are thrown into stark relief, as the author takes us through a daily struggle for survival.

Told with clarity, passion and an incredible eye for detail and description, this is an utterly enthralling story and a classic in the making.' (Pan Macmillan)