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Only the Animals
Perhaps only the animals can tell us what it is to be human. The souls of ten animals caught up in human conflicts over the last century tell their astonishing stories of life and death. In a trench on the Western Front a cat recalls her owner Colette's theatrical antics in Paris. In Nazi Germany a dog seeks enlightenment. A Russian tortoise once owned by the Tolstoys drifts in space during the Cold War. In the siege of Sarajevo a bear starving to death tells a fairytale. And a dolphin sent to Iraq by the US Navy writes a letter to Sylvia Plath . . . Exquisitely written, playful and poignant, Only the Animals is a remarkable literary achievement by one of our brightest young writers. An animal's-eye view of humans at our brutal, violent worst and our creative, imaginative best, it asks us to find our way back to empathy not only for animals, but for other people, and to believe again in the redemptive power of reading and writing fiction.
Blood Kin
Shortlisted for the John Llewellyn Rhys Prize Shortlisted for the Commonwealth Writers' Prize A chef, a portraitist and a barber are taken hostage in a coup to overthrow their boss, the President. They are held captive in a palatial retreat in the mountains high above the capital city. Far below them, chaos tears through the streets. The chef's daughter, the portraitist's wife and the barber's lover watch their men from the shadows. In such precarious times, intimate relationships are as dangerous as political ones. As the old order falls, so does the veil that hides the truth about these men and women's secret passions. Drawing her readers masterfully towards the novel's devastating climax, Ceridwen Dovey reveals how humanity's most atavistic impulses - vanity, vengeance and greed - seethe, relentlessly, just beneath the veneer of civility.
Life After Truth
"Fifteen years after graduating from Harvard, five close friends on the cusp of middle age are still pursuing an elusive happiness and wondering if they’ve wasted their youthful opportunities. Jules, already a famous actor when she arrived on campus, is changing in mysterious ways but won’t share what is haunting her. Mariam and Rowan, who married young, are struggling with the demands of family life and starting to regret prioritising meaning over wealth in their careers. Eloise, now a professor who studies the psychology of happiness, is troubled by her younger wife’s radical politics. And Jomo, founder of a luxury jewellery company, has been carrying an engagement ring around for months, unsure whether his girlfriend is the one. The soul searching begins in earnest at their much-anticipated college reunion weekend on the Harvard campus, when the most infamous member of their class, Frederick - senior advisor and son of the recently elected and loathed US president - turns up dead. Old friends often think they know everything about one another, but time has a way of making us strangers to those we love - and to ourselves."--Publisher description.
In the Garden of the Fugitives
Almost twenty years after forbidding him to contact her, Vita receives an email from her old benefactor, Royce. Once, she was one of his brightest protégées; now her career has stalled and Royce is ailing, and each has a need to settle accounts. Beyond their murky shared history, both have lost beloveds, one to an untimely death, another to a strange disappearance. And both are trying to free themselves from deeper pasts, Vita from the inheritance of her birthplace, Royce from the grip of the ancient city of Pompeii and the secrets of the Garden of the Fugitives. Between what’s been repressed and what has been excavated are disturbances that reach back through decades, even centuries. Addictive and unsettling, In the Garden of the Fugitives is a masterpiece of duplicity and counterplay, as brilliantly illuminating as it is surprising – about the obscure workings of guilt in the human psyche, the compulsion to create, and the dangerous morphing of desire into control. It is the breakthrough work of one of Australia’s most exciting emerging writers.
On J. M. Coetzee
‘I was born in the year J.M. Coetzee published his third novel, Waiting for the Barbarians. My mother read this dark, disturbing book with its multiple scenes of torture as she breastfed me at night, while my older sister slept and the house was quiet. It was 1980. The apartheid government had declared a state of emergency in the face of growing internal revolt, and my parents were thinking of leaving South Africa again.’ For Ceridwen Dovey, J.M. Coetzee has ‘always been there’, ‘challenging the rest of us to keep up, resisting our attempts to pin him down.’ Her mother wrote the first critical study of Coetzee’s early novels, uncovering their startlingly original ways of bringing together literature and politics. With tenderness and insight, Dovey draws on this family history to explore the Nobel Prize–winner’s work.
Mothertongues
After sharing their artistic frustrations at the school gate, two women decide to take a risk- to co-write a book about early motherhood. Off-colour, offbeat, off their heads, they begin - but then, what is motherhood if not messy, non-linear, multi-authored and potty mouthed? Together they gather scenes and songs, poems and text messages, insights and ephemera, alive to both the playfulness and the danger of co-creation. From the salvaged scraps of their daily lives they make an intimate collage of absurd mothering, failing mothering and moving mothering, imagining themselves into a future where women don't always have to choose between art and motherhood. After all- these mothers are tired. They are busy. They are lucky. They talk. Perform. Categorise. Clown. They do sad dinner cabaret. They do heroic odyssey. They do motherhood the musical. No bells and whistles, no false cheer. They do it badly, they do it well, they do it and they do it, and they keep on doing it as women do- comically, communally, creatively. Funny, thoughtful, vulnerable and disturbingly familiar, Mothertongues up-ends ideas of genre and speaks motherhood anew.
How Green Was My Valley
The international-bestselling winner of the National Book Award and the basis for the Academy Award–winning film directed by John Ford. Huw Morgan remembers the days when his home valley was prosperous, verdant, and beautiful—before the mines came to town. The youngest son of a respectable mining family in South Wales, he is now the only one left in the valley, and his reminiscences tell the story of a family and a town both defined and ruined by the mines. Huw’s story is both joyful and heartrending—a portrait of a place and a people existing now only in memory. Full of memorable characters, richly crafted language, and surprising humor, How Green Was My Valley is the first of four books chronicling Huw’s life, including the sequels Up into the Singing Mountain, Down Where the Moon is Small, and Green, Green My Valley Now. “The reader emerges from these tense pages strangely aglow with sharing the happiness of the characters . . . The simplicity of the language and its delicately strange flavor give the book added charm.” —Chicago Tribune
Inner Worlds Outer Spaces
What does it feel like to be passionate about your daily work? How do people find their way into fascinating, unusually fulfilling careers, even against the odds? Space lawyers and bibliotherapists; euthanasia activists and women's rugby champions; shark experts and solar power visionaries; a master perfumer and a moon dust maven, among many others. What all of these people have in common is the courage to pursue their dreams and obsessions, no matter how niche or particular, and transform them into their life's work. In the process, they've enacted lasting change in the world around them. Delving into the working lives of others for publications as diverse as newyorker.com, The Monthly and WIRED, Ceridwen Dovey's inquisitive, thoughtful approach has allowed her to explore fields of knowledge and expertise that are often inaccessible to outsiders. The resulting profiles are a celebration of the extraordinary and meaningful work done by those on paths less travelled.
Fugitive
In 1917, a young composer writes a suite of twenty pieces for piano. Each pass by like a gust of wind. They are short, violent and strange – the music of another world. In 1938, a young Jewish family flees Italy for Sydney, Australia. In 1942, another family, this time Polish, is nearly destroyed. Half a century later, a young man begins to understand the role the young composer's strange visions have played in everything that came before him and all that has come to be. In his first book, Simon Tedeschi applies elements – from history, memory and the body of the musician – to make a remarkable work of imagination and fractal beauty. He straddles the borders of poetry and prose, fiction and fact, trauma and testimony. Fugitive is filled with what Russian poet Konstantin Balmont called ‘the fickle play of rainbows’.
Dr Space Junk vs The Universe
Going boldly forth as a pioneer in the fledgling field of space archaeology, Dr Alice Gorman (aka Dr Space Junk) turns the common perception of archaeology as an exploration of the ancient on its head. Her captivating inquiry into the most modern and daring of technologies spanning some 60 years — a mere speck in cosmic terms — takes the reader on a journey which captures the relics of space forays and uncovers the cultural value of detritus all too readily dismissed as junk. In this book, she takes a physical journey through the solar system and beyond, and a conceptual journey into human interactions with space. Her tools are artefacts, historical explorations, the occasional cocktail ...
