Back-To-Back Issues. Paperback Cover

Making It Up by Penelope Lively - RM 17.90

Review from: penelopelively.net

These elegant confabulations, as she calls them, allow Lively's talents full range, intelligent, limpidly well-written and full of human understanding, they evoke the times she has seen and the richness of other lives as well as her own. (Anne Chisholm, Sunday Telegraph)

Lively is one of our longest-standing and best-loved novelists, and rightly so, for she manages to sustain a true interest not only in the real life on which she gives us her fictional slant but also in the form of her own art. . MAKING IT UP is a truly novel book . . . . (Salley Vickers, The Times) 

This book is everybody's daydreams made real, and is a complete joy. (Heather Preen - Daily Express)

The Myth of You and Me by Leah Stewart - RM 15.90

Review from: Reading Group Guides

When Cameron was fifteen, Sonia was her best friend---no one could come between them. Now Cameron is a twenty-nine-year-old research assistant with no meaningful ties to anyone except her aging boss, noted historian Oliver Doucet.

When an unexpected letter arrives from Sonia ten years after the incident that ended their friendship, Cameron doesn't reply, despite Oliver's urging. But then he passes away, and Cameron discovers that he has left her with one final task: to track down Sonia and hand-deliver a mysterious package to her. Now without a job, a home, and a purpose, Cameron decides to honor his request, setting off on the road to find this stranger who was once her inseparable other half.
The Myth of You and Me, the story of Cameron and Sonia's friendship---as intense as any love affair---and its dramatic demise, captures the universal sense of loss and nostalgia that often lingers after the end of an important relationship. Searingly honest, beautiful, and full of fragile urgency, The Myth of You and Me is a celebration and portrait of a friendship that will appeal to anyone who still feels the absence of that first true friend.

The Dickinson Papers by Mark Ragg

 -  RM 17.90

Review from: Booklovers

A priceless exhibition of the papers of poet Emily Dickinson goes missing on arrival in Sydney. Jock, a lonely single father who loves poems, books and stories of all kinds, starts to follow the newspaper articles about the theft, and finds himself increasingly drawn to the mysterious and brilliant Lola, the curator of the exhibition. Both nursing wounded hearts and damaged lives, slowly they begin to reach out to each other through letters, emails and occasional encounters. When the police start receiving clues from the thief – marked on Sydney road maps – Jock find himself drawn into the hunt. But in a city with a story on every street corner, can he tell the hints from the red herrings in time to find the exhibition and win Lola’s heart?

A quirky and engaging novel, THE DICKINSON PAPERS is at once a modern love story, a tribute to a great poet and a love letter to the city of Sydney.

Gone With The Windsors by Laurie Graham - RM 17.90

Review from: Historical-Fiction

Written by a Wallis Simpson friend in diary format, Gone with the Windsors is not unlike the popular British series Bridget Jones’ Diary, except Maybell is a bit more old-fashioned and reserved than Miss Jones. The socialite’s life includes planning parties, shopping for the perfect outfit and trying to meet the elite and the royal. When the Baltimore girls, Wally and Maybell, find their way into HRH’s inner circle, things will never be the same.

Being unfamiliar with this particular time in British history, I did learn a lot about the customs and the pastimes of the various classes as well as the hierarchy of royal families. Fashion, food, furnishings and modes of travel are described in detail.

The main characters are given great quirks and personalities, but there are a lot of names to keep up with. Most of them are mentioned several times and so you’ll want to remember with who is who. As the story gets closer to the war it gets more interesting and less trivial. It’s fascinating how differently people viewed the situation.

I enjoyed this book and I would recommend it as a light, fun read, but as historical novels go it is not in my list of favorites.

Johnny Come Home by Jake Arnott - RM 15.90

Review from:

Ask any sensible person, especially someone who might be too young to remember, and all you'll hear about the 1970s is that they were crap: the ugly clothes, the unspeakable music and the general pointlessness of day-to-day life. The agreed opinion on the decade is so strong (and indeed has spawned numerous TV shows) that to dissent seems almost a revolutionary act. Jake Arnott's hypnotic, feverish and altogether wonderful Johnny Come Home - his first novel after the brilliant Long Firm trilogy - embraces the unfashionable idea that perhaps real passion simmered behind the platform shoes and glitter make-up; that beneath the enervating malaise was a vital, electrifying anger.

The year is 1972. The Stoke Newington Eight are on trial for bombs let off by the Angry Brigade. Stephen Pearson is a hippy involved on the fringes of the Brigade, but his problems are more personal. He lives in a squat with his lover O'Connell, and when O'Connell commits suicide, their lesbian housemate Nina worries about how Pearson will cope. Pearson - soft, impressionable, easily led - only had an identity in relation to his boyfriend. Where is there to go for a follower whose leader has died?

Pearson responds by unexpectedly asking glamorous, sparkly, attitude-filled rent boy Sweet Thing to live in the squat. Sweet Thing is an androgynous beauty, though he describes himself as "not bent, rent" and sees the world as a commodity. "I don't want to be free," he says when Pearson tries to explain gay liberation, "I want to be expensive."

Annoyed at first, Nina begins to see vulnerability in Sweet Thing and, despite herself, starts to worry about him. Sweet Thing is happy with the new arrangement, because it gives him a base from which to work with his most lucrative client, Johnny Chrome. Johnny is a mostly talentless glam rock star who has unexpectedly found himself with a hit single. Unable to cope with the sudden fame or deal with his hardbitten manager Joe, Johnny depends increasingly on drugs and the presence of Sweet Thing to get through the day.

Trouble looms in the form of Detective Sergeant Walker, a member of the Met's "hippy squad" who is charged with infiltrating groups like the Angry Brigade. What might he have known about O'Connell? And where exactly do his loyalties lie?

Events start to converge. While cleaning up O'Connell's room, Pearson finds an unexploded bomb. Nina, in a scene of marvellously understated gender swapping, sleeps with Sweet Thing. Johnny Chrome discovers that he can't go onstage, can't perform at all, unless Sweet Thing is with him. And Sweet Thing begins to wonder, dangerously, who he might be underneath the make-up. The road leads to tragedy, but Arnott doesn't take the expected avenues, and the ending manages to be both devastating and optimistic.

Minus Nine To One: The Diary Of an Honest Mum by Jools Oliver - RM 17.90

Review from: Infibeam

Being pregnant for the first time changed Jools Oliver's life. Having longed for children since before she can remember, she was suddenly faced with an array of unfamiliar, unexpected and sometimes downright embarrassing emotional and physical reactions. And when Poppy (and a year later Daisy) was born she had to learn a whole new set of skills. From trying to conceive and first positive pregnancy test to Poppy's first birthday, Minus Nine To One takes you through the worries, surprises, excitement, miracles and sheer bloody hard work that Jools and all new mums in their own different ways have to cope with along the way. As Jools writes, This certainly isn't meant to be read as a guidebook, or a medical reference book it is simply my story and I hope that you can relate to it in some way (and maybe even relax with it in the bath!). Down to earth, personal and very very funny, this is the book no aspiring mother will want to be without.

The Crimson Portrait by Jody Shields - RM 17.90

Review from: Reviews Of Books

The Crimson Portrait is set in an English country manor during World War I. Catherine is the owner of the house, but having lost her husband and means of support to the war, her house is converted to a hospital for soldiers who have suffered horrific facial disfigurement. All mirrors have been removed from the house so that the men can't see their own injuries. Pioneering new surgical techniques, Dr. McCleary and dental surgeon Dr. Kazanjian, try to reconstruct their faces. They're aided by an American artist, Anna, who draws the new facial masks for the men based on their photographs. Catherine, however, falls for one of the patients, and begins to wonder whether he might really be her husband. She uses subterfuge to get Anna to re-create the mask for the patient based on her husband's photograph. Jody Shields' novel has received positive reviews with the Seattle Times saying, "The Crimson Portrait has much in common with Fields' earlier novel, her promising debut, The Fig Eater. Both are set in the early part of the 20th century. Both are based loosely on real events. And both are rich, multilayered tales exploring the porous boundaries of science, art and faith."

The Firemaster's Mistress by Christie Dickason

- RM 17.90

Review from: Christie Dickason

The Firemaster's Mistress may tell the real truth behind the mysterious gunpowder Plot of 1605, although it set out only to slip imaginative speculation into the cracks in historical fact.

Francis Quoynt, fire master and explosives expert
is recently back from Flanders and dreaming of making fireworks, not war. Instead, he is blackmailed by the English Secretary of State, Robert Cecil, into spying for the government on the Gunpowder Plotters. The trouble is that Francis likes Robert Catesby and his co-plotters far more than he likes his employer. This work also makes him the enemy of the woman he loves, the Catholic glove-maker, Kate Peach. It also leads him inexorably into the heart of a plot far larger than anyone imagined, international in scale and threatening the survival of England itself.

Though The Firemaster's Mistress is an historical novel, modern readers will find the politics, threat of terrorism, and information spinning frighteningly familiar. 

Enjoy Reading... Adios!