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"If you didn't want them to think, you shouldn't
have given them library cards."
Robert
Kaufman
[More on Libraries]
Indian in the Cupboard Study
Guide

Omri receives several conventional gifts
for his ninth birthday. However, two gifts you would expect to be of
least
interest to a young boy prove to be magical and exciting. Suitable for
primary aged students this study guide has learning outcomes in key
learning
areas such as English, Art and Society and Environment. |
Books for you to
Read Right Now
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The Independence of Miss Mary
Bennett
by Colleen McCullough
Everyone knows the story of Elizabeth and Jane
Bennet in Pride and Prejudice. But what about their
sister Mary? At the conclusion of Jane Austen's classic novel,
Mary, bookish, awkward, and by all accounts, unmarriageable, is
sentenced to a dull, provincial existence in the backwaters of
Britain. Now, master storyteller Colleen McCullough rescues Mary
from her dreary fate with The Independence of Miss Mary
Bennet, a page-turning sequel set twenty years after
Austen's novel closes. The story begins as the neglected Bennet
sister is released from the stultifying duty of caring for her
insufferable mother. Though many would call a woman of Mary's
age a spinster, she has blossomed into a beauty to rival that of
her famed sisters. Her violet eyes and perfect figure bewitch
the eligible men in the neighborhood, but though her family
urges her to marry, romance and frippery hold no attraction.
Instead, she is determined to set off on an adventure of her
own. Fired with zeal by the newspaper letters of the mysterious
Argus, she resolves to publish a book about the plight of
England's poor. Plunging from one predicament into another, Mary
finds herself stumbling closer to long-buried secrets,
unanticipated dangers, and unlooked-for romance. |
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The Trout Opera
Longlisted for the Australia-Asia Literary Award
by Matthew Condon
A stunning new novel - over ten years in the
writing - from Matthew Condon. This book takes his writing on to
a new level - this could be the next Great Australian Novel.THE
TROUT OPERA - more than ten years in the writing - is a stunning
epic novel that encompasses twentieth-century Australia. Opening
with a Christmas pageant on the banks of the Snowy River in 1906
and ending with the opening ceremony of the Sydney Olympics in
2000, it is the story of simple rabbiter and farmhand Wilfred
Lampe who, at the end of his long life, is unwittingly swept up
into an international spectacle. On the way he discovers a
great-niece, the wild and troubled young Aurora, whom he never
knew existed, and together they take an unlikely road trip that
changes their lives. Wilfred, who has only ever left Dalgety
once in almost a hundred years, comes face to face with
contemporary Australia, and Aurora, enmeshed in the complex
social problems of a modern nation, is taught how to repair her
damaged life.
This dazzling story - marvellously broad in its telling and
superbly crafted - is about the changing nature of the
Australian character, finding the source of human decency in a
mad world, history, war, romance, murder, bushfires, drugs, the
fragile and resilient nature of the environment and the art of
fly fishing. It's the story of a man who has experienced the
tumultuous reverberations of Australian history while never
moving from his birthplace on the Snowy, and it asks, what
constitutes a meaningful life?
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The
Secret Scripture
Shortlisted for the Man Booker
by Sebastian Barry
The acclaim that has greeted Sebastian Barry’s
The Secret Scripture is varied and enthusiastic, and it's
not hard to see why. When Frank McGuiness praised it for ‘raw,
rough beauty’ and described Sebastian Barry's fiction as
‘unique’ and ‘magnificent’, this claim was no hostage to
fortune; just a few sentences of the prose here will convince
most readers of the justice of those words. As in the
best-selling A Long Long Way, Barry is concerned with the
imperatives of telling a story, but in a literary form that is
rich with both psychological understanding and a skilful
conjuring of time and place.
Roseanne McNulty may (or may not) be on the
point of nearing her 100th birthday -- but there is little
certainty about this fact. In her twilight years, her destiny is
uncertain, as the Roscommon Mental Hospital -- her home for so
many years of her life -- is on the point of closing. As the
fateful hour approaches, Roseanne spends her time of talking to
her psychiatrist of many years, Dr Grene. The relationship
between the two is strangely interdependent, and the doctor is
also attempting to come to terms with the death of his wife. As
we learn more about the two principal protagonists, we are
presented with a rich and subtle picture of human relationships
-- and the (often unintentional) damages that we all do to each
other.
The form of the book consists of the separate
journals of Roseanne and Dr Grene, and we gradually learn about
Roseanne’s family in Sligo in the 1930s. What emergence is a
poignant personal history; it is also a subtly ambitious picture
of nothing less than the Irish psyche at a particular point in
its history. There are echoes here of another great Irish
chronicler of the human condition, William Trevor, and The
Secret Scripture is no worse for that. |
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The Hour
I First Believed: A Novel
by
Wally Lamb
Wally Lamb's two previous novels, She's
Come Undone and I Know This Much Is True, struck a
chord with readers. They responded to the intensely
introspective nature of the books, and to their lively narrative
styles and biting humor. One critic called Wally Lamb a
"modern-day Dostoyevsky," whose characters struggle not only
with their respective pasts, but with a "mocking, sadistic God"
in whom they don't believe but to whom they turn, nevertheless,
in times of trouble (New York Times).
In his new novel, The Hour I First Believed,
Lamb travels well beyond his earlier work and embodies in his
fiction myth, psychology, family history stretching back many
generations, and the questions of faith that lie at the heart of
everyday life. The result is an extraordinary tour de force, at
once a meditation on the human condition and an unflinching yet
compassionate evocation of character.
The Hour I First Believed
is a profound and heart-rending work of fiction. Wally Lamb
proves himself a virtuoso storyteller, assembling a variety of
voices and an ensemble of characters rich enough to evoke all of
humanity.
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...or request it free* |
Sorry
Shortlisted for the Miles Franklin Award
by Gail Jones
A story of sacrifice, silence and forgiveness
from Jones (Dreams of Speaking, 2006, etc.).Perdita Keene is a
little girl growing up in the Australian bush in the late 1930s.
Her parents are English. Her father is an anthropologist, but
his studies of Australia's native people are never going to
produce bold, revelatory theories about primitive humans, and he
is never going to return to Oxford as a renowned scholar. Her
mother had no idea, when she got married, that her husband would
take her to the remote ends of the world. Her only consolation
is Shakespeare. He is her religion, and she knows whole plays
and sonnets by heart. The Keene marriage is a loveless one, and
they make no effort to shield their daughter from the knowledge
that she was a mistake. The only kindness Perdita has ever known
is that of Aboriginal caretakers, and her only friends are
misfits. Billy is deaf and mute - generally considered to be an
idiot - and Mary is a native and an orphan. The fulcrum around
which this novel revolves is the murder of Perdita's father. The
narrative returns to it again and again, each time revealing new
information. When Perdita finally understands what really
happened, when she struggles to find a proper response to her
new and horrible knowing, the story resolves into an allegory
about Australia, about the lopsided and lamentable relationship
between white settlers and natives. Allegory is not, of course,
a form known for its rich character development, and readers
seeking narrative intimacy will be disappointed. Jones has a
cool, ornate style. She always chooses the philosophical over
the mawkish, the universal over the particular. This keeps her
tale of neglect, abuse and murder from descending into
melodrama, but it also keeps the reader at a distance. Jones's
rhetorical flourishes are often arresting, but her psychological
insights tend toward the trite.Poignant, but unsatisfying. (Kirkus
Reviews)
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frantic
katherine howell
Best Price
$31.10
or Buy New
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Frantic
Winner: Best Crime Novel -
by Katherine Howell
Sisters in Crime Davitt Awards
In one terrible moment, paramedic Sophie
Phillips' life is torn apart - her police officer husband,
Chris, is shot on their doorstep and their ten-month-old son,
Lachlan, is stolen from his bed. The police suspect Chris is
involved with a number of armed hold-ups and that the attack is
revenge for his desire to distance himself from the robberies,
but Sophie believes the attack is much more personal - and the
perpetrator far more dangerous... While Chris is in hospital and
the police, led by Detective Ella Marconi, are moving heaven and
earth to find their colleague's child, Sophie's desperation to
make amends compels her to search for Lachlan herself. She
enlists her husband's partner, Angus Arendson, in her hunt for
her son, but will the history they share prove harmful to
Sophie's ability to complete her mission?
..or request it free* |
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Read right now archive |
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Koala
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Lovely story about hard work to obtain a goal, but also that our
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Masterpiece
Not only is
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Waiting
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