1) "The Book Thief" by Markus Zusak
When Death tells a story, you pay attention. Liesel Meminger is a young girl growing up outside of Munich in Nazi Germany, and Death tells her story as “an attempt—a flying jump of an attempt—to prove to me that you, and your human existence, are worth it.” When her foster father helps her learn to read and she discovers the power of words, Liesel begins stealing books from Nazi book burnings and the mayor’s wife’s library. As she becomes a better reader, she becomes a writer, writing a book about her life in such a miserable time. Liesel’s experiences move Death to say, “I am haunted by humans.” How could the human race be “so ugly and so glorious” at the same time? This big, expansive novel is a leisurely working out of fate, of seemingly chance encounters and events that ultimately touch, like dominoes as they collide. The writing is elegant, philosophical and moving. Even at its length, it’s a work to read slowly and savor. Beautiful and important.(Fiction. 12+)
2) "Cloudstreet" by Tim Winton
3) "The Rosie Project" by Graeme Simsion
Polished debut fiction, from Australian author Simsion, about a brilliant but emotionally challenged geneticist who develops a questionnaire to screen potential mates but finds love instead. The book won the 2012 Victorian Premier's Literary Award for an unpublished manuscript.
“I became aware of applause. It seemed natural. I had been living in the world of romantic comedy and this was the final scene. But it was real.” So Don Tillman, our perfectly imperfect narrator and protagonist, tells us. While he makes this observation near the end of the book, it comes as no surprise—this story plays the rom-com card from the first sentence. Don is challenged, almost robotic. He cannot understand social cues, barely feels emotion and can’t stand to be touched. Don’s best friends are Gene and Claudia, psychologists. Gene brought Don as a postdoc to the prestigious university where he is now an associate professor. Gene is a cad, a philanderer who chooses women based on nationality—he aims to sleep with a woman from every country. Claudia is tolerant until she’s not. Gene sends Rosie, a graduate student in his department, to Don as a joke, a ringer for the Wife Project. Finding her woefully unsuitable, Don agrees to help the beautiful but fragile Rosie learn the identity of her biological father. Pursuing this Father Project, Rosie and Don collide like particles in an atom smasher: hilarity, dismay and carbonated hormones ensue. The story lurches from one set piece of deadpan nudge-nudge, wink-wink humor to another: We laugh at, and with, Don as he tries to navigate our hopelessly emotional, nonliteral world, learning as he goes. Simsion can plot a story, set a scene, write a sentence, finesse a detail. A pity more popular fiction isn’t this well-written. If you liked Australian author Toni Jordan's Addition (2009), with its math-obsessed, quirky heroine, this book is for you.
A sparkling, laugh-out-loud novel.
4) "The Thorn Birds" by Collen McCullough
5) "The Forgotten Garden" by Kate Morton
A four-year-old girl abandoned aboard a ship touches off a century-long inquiry into her ancestry, in Morton’s weighty, at times unwieldy, second novel (The House at Riverton, 2008).
In 1913, Hugh, portmaster of Maryborough, Australia, discovers a child alone on a vessel newly arrived from England. The little girl cannot recall her name and has no identification, only a white suitcase containing some clothes and a book of fairy tales by Eliza Makepeace. Hugh and his wife, childless after several miscarriages, name the girl Nell and raise her as their own. At 21, she is engaged to be married and has no idea she is not their biological daughter. When Hugh confesses the truth, Nell’s equilibrium is destroyed, but life and World War II intervene, and she doesn’t explore her true origins until 1975, when she journeys to London. There she learns of Eliza’s sickly cousin Rose, daughter of Lord Linus Mountrachet and his lowborn, tightly wound wife, Lady Adeline. Mountrachet’s beloved sister Georgiana disgraced the family by running off to London to live in squalor with a sailor, who then abruptly disappeared. Eliza was their daughter, reclaimed by Linus after Georgiana’s death and brought back to Blackhurst, the gloomy Mountrachet manor in Cornwall. Interviewing secretive locals at Blackhurst, now under renovation as a hotel, Nell traces her parentage to Rose and her husband, society portraitist Nathaniel Walker—except that their only daughter died at age four. Nell’s quest is interrupted at this point, but after her death in 2005, her granddaughter Cassandra takes it up. Intricate, intersecting narratives, heavy-handed fairy-tale symbolism and a giant red herring suggesting possible incest create a thicket of clues as impenetrable and treacherous as Eliza’s overgrown garden and the twisty maze on the Mountrachet estate.
Murky, but the puzzle is pleasing and the long-delayed “reveal” is a genuine surprise.
6) "Eyrie" by Tim Winton
An odd troika stumbles through the decadence of a world on the verge of collapse in Winton’s (Breath, 2008, etc.) resonant, oddly cheerful yarn.
Tom Keely is a mess. A one-time environmental activist, he’s failed at that, and spectacularly. He’s failed at marriage, at fatherhood. Now, living high up in a seedy apartment tower on the farthest edge of western Australia, he has recurrent fears of falling out the window and off the face of the Earth—small wonder, given his staggering chemical diet. Winton’s narrative opens with a king-hell hangover, Keely lying as still as he can in the growing heat of morning, contemplating a stain on the rug: “He had no idea what it was or how it got there. But the sight of it put the wind right up him.” Things don’t promise to get much better for him in that hellish tower among the “stench of strangers” until, hitherto oblivious, he discovers that a neighbor is someone he vaguely knew in his younger days, way back when things were good and promised to get better. As with Tom, the years have not been kind to Gemma Buck, once quietly attractive, now guardian to her grandson, a spooky little kid given to apocalyptic visions and to saying things such as “The birds in the world will die....All of them, the birds. They die.” If young Kai’s dreams are haunted by extinction and doom, he’s got cause: Mom’s a jailbird, dad’s a thug, and they’re hitting Gemma up hard for money she doesn’t have. Dyspeptic in a way that would please a David Lodge or Malcolm Bradbury, Tom unsteadily tries to help, finally given a mission to fill his idle, meaningless days. But is he Kai’s rescuer, or is Kai his? Sometimes brooding, always superbly well-written, Winton’s story studies family—even a family that is as postmodern and anti-nuclear as our hapless trio—both as anchor to keep the ship from drifting away and anchor to keep whomever it’s tied to submerged.
Another exquisite portrait of troubled modern life from Winton, who solidifies his reputation as one of the best writers at work in Australia—and, indeed, in English—today.
7) "The Power of One" by Bryce Courtenay
Ideals must be back, for Courtenay's first novel is a fast-paced book with an old-fashioned, clean-cut hero, easily identifiable villains, no sex, and saintlike sidekicks. All done in sturdy, workmanlike prose. Set in South Africa in the 1940s, the novel resembles those enormously popular books on southern Africa written by John Buchan and H. Rider Haggard. Courtenay's Peekay, like those earlier heroes, inspires devotion from a disparate band of followers, which includes a witch doctor, a German professor, a barmaid, Gert the Afrikaans policeman, Morrie the Jewish refugee, and his Oxbridge headmaster. Courtenay lovingly evokes an African landscape of small town and bush as he describes the journey of Peekay—from a horrendously cruel boarding school to a triumphant vindication as a young man in the copper mines of what is now Zambia. At his first school, Peekay, as the only English child in an otherwise Afrikaans school, is held accountable for all the wrongs inflicted by the British. But a fortuitous meeting with an amateur boxer, "Kid Louis" Groenewald, supplies the young Peekay with the means and the drive to fight back. Peekay learns to box (boxing fans will particularly appreciate the vividly described fights) and thereafter is forever serving justice and earning Brownie points. His first teachers are the tough Afrikaner jailers of his hometown prison and a black prisoner. Later, at a prep school in Johannesburg, while the victorious Afrikaner Nationalists introduce apartheid, he is taught by the best trainer in Africa. As well as being a scholar and everybody's favorite young man, Peekay also earns a reputation among the blacks as a great chief—"The Tadpole Angel"—who is destined to save them, but not in this book. Peekay is just too noble, and his political views, perhaps reflecting those of his times, are paternal to say the least. But, nevertheless, this is a somewhat endearing, if uncritical, celebration of virtue and positive thinking. Despite the lack of shading and the chipper philosophy, then, a surprisingly refreshing debut.
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