Akin by Emma Donoghue

$35.00 NZD

Category: Fiction - Contemporary | Reading Level: 1 Fiction

Noah Selvaggio is a retired chemistry professor and widower living on the Upper West Side, but born in the South of France. He is days away from his long-awaited first trip back to Nice, but he receives a call from social services: Noah is the closest available relative of his eleven-year-old great-neph ew and he urgently needs someone to take him in.Plagued by guilt and a feeling of duty to his dead sister, Noah agrees to foster the kid 'just for couple of weeks' and takes him along on his visit to Nice. This unlikely duo, both feeling adrift in their lives and suffering from culture shock, argue about everything from steak frites to Snapchat.Noah is disappointed by how much Nice has changed since he left. When sharp-eyed Michael identifies the historic Hotel Excelsior in one of Noah's photographs, they decide to check in - but once inside their luxury suite, Noah's perception of his ancestral heritage starts to crack. Shocking stories of the Nazi occupation surface: a hotel re-purposed for torture, a secret resistance movement, and Noah's mysterious mother on the front lines of history. As dark truths about this famous tourist mecca come to light, Noah learns to appreciate Michael's street-smart wit and ease with technology. He finally grasps the great risks people in all ages have taken for their kin. ...Show more

Girl by Edna O'Brien

$33.00 NZD

Category: Fiction - Contemporary | Reading Level: 1 Fiction

Girl, Edna O'Brien's courageous new novel is an unforgettable depiction of one woman's abduction by Boko Haram. 'By an extraordinary act of the imagination we are transported into the inner world of a girl who, after brutal abuse as a slave to Nigerian jihadis, escapes and with dogged persistence begins to rebuild her shattered life. Girl is a courageous book about a courageous spirit.' - J.M. Coetzee Captured, abducted and married into Boko Haram, the narrator of this story witnesses and suffers the horrors of a community of men governed by a brutal code of violence. Barely more than a girl herself, she must soon learn how to survive as a woman with a child of her own. Just as the world around her seems entirely consumed by madness, bound for hell, she is offered an escape of sorts - but only into another landscape of trials and terrors amidst the unforgiving wilds of northeastern Nigeria, through the forest and beyond; a place where her traumas are met with the blinkered judgement of a society in denial. How do we love in a world that has lost its moorings? How can we comprehend the barbarism of our enemies, and learn forgiveness for atrocities committed in the name of ideology? ...Show more

Cilka's Journey by Heather Morris

$37.00 NZD

Category: Fiction - Contemporary | Reading Level: 1 Fiction

The sequel to the International Number One Bestseller The Tattooist of Auschwitz, based on a true story of love and resilience. In 1942 Cilka is just sixteen years old when she is taken to Auschwitz-Birkenau Concentration Camp. The Commandant at Birkenau, Schwarzhuber, notices her long beautiful hair, a nd forces her separation from the other women prisoners. Cilka learns quickly that power, even unwillingly given, equals survival. After liberation, Cilka is charged as a collaborator for sleeping with the enemy and sent to a desolate, brutal prison camp in Siberia known as Vorkuta, inside the Arctic Circle.  Innocent and imprisoned once again, Cilka faces challenges both new and horribly familiar. When she makes an impression on a female doctor, Cilka is taken under her wing and begins to tend to the ill in the camp, struggling to care for them under unimaginable conditions. Cilka finds endless resources within herself as she confronts death and faces terror, each day a battle for survival. And when she nurses a man called Aleksandr, Cilka finds that despite everything that has happened to her, there is room in her heart for love. Based on what is known of Cilka’s time in Auschwitz, and on the experience of women in Siberian prison camps, Cilka’s Journey is the breathtaking sequel to The Tattooist of Auschwitz. A powerful testament to the triumph of the human will in adversity, Cilka’s Journey will make you weep, but it will also leave you with the remarkable story of one woman’s fierce determination to survive, against all odds. 'She was the bravest person I ever met' - Lale Sokolov, The Tattooist of Auschwitz ...Show more

The Dutch House by Ann Patchett

$33.00 NZD

Category: Fiction - Contemporary | Reading Level: 1 Fiction

A masterpiece from the Orange Prize-winning, New York Times number one bestselling author of Commonwealth and Bel Canto: a story of love, family, sacrifice, and the power of place. Danny Conroy grows up in the Dutch House, a lavish folly in small-town Pennsylvania taken on by his property developer fat her. Though his father is distant and his mother is absent, Danny has his beloved sister Maeve: Maeve, with her wall of black hair, her delicacy, her brilliance. Life is comfortable and coherent, played out under the watchful eyes of the house's former owners in the frames of their oil paintings, or under the cover of the draperies around the window seat in Maeve's room. Then one day their father brings Andrea home: Andrea, small and neat, a dark hat no bigger than a saucer pinned over a twist of her fair hair. Though they cannot know it, Andrea's advent to the Dutch House sows the seed of the defining loss of Danny and Maeve's lives. Her arrival will exact a banishment: a banishment whose reverberations will echo for the rest of their lives. For all that the world is open to him, for all that he can accumulate, for all that life is full, Danny and his sister are drawn back time and again to the place they can never enter, knocking in vain on the locked door of the past. For behind the mystery of their own enforced exile is that of their mother's self-imposed one: an absence more powerful than any presence they have known. Told with Ann Patchett's inimitable blend of wit and heartbreak, The Dutch House is a story of family, betrayal, love, responsibility and sacrifice; of the powerful bonds of place and time that magnetize and repel us for our whole lives, and the lives of those who survive us. ...Show more

The Cockroach by Ian McEwan

$20.00 NZD

Category: Fiction - Contemporary

The Cockroach is a bitingly funny political satire in which the main character, Jim Sams, has undergone a metamorphosis. In his previous life he was ignored or loathed, but in his new incarnation he is the most powerful man in Britain – and it is his mission to carry out the will of the peopl e. Nothing must get in his way: not the opposition, nor the dissenters within his own party. Not even the rules of parliamentary democracy.   With trademark intelligence, insight and scabrous humour, Ian McEwan pays tribute to Franz Kafka’s most famous work to engage with a world turned on its head.   Ian McEwan says:   ‘As the nation tears itself apart, constitutional norms are set aside, parliament is closed down so that the government cannot be challenged at a crucial time and ministers lie about it shamelessly in the old Soviet style, and when many Brexiters in high places seem to crave the economic catastrophe of a no deal, and English nationalist extremists are attacking the police in Parliament Square, a writer is bound to ask what he or she can do.  There’s only one answer: write.  The Cockroach is a political satire in an old tradition.  Mockery might be a therapeutic response, though it’s hardly a solution.  But a reckless, self-harming, ugly and alien spirit has entered the minds of certain politicians and newspaper proprietors.  They lie to their supporters.  The express contempt for judges and the rule and norms of law.  They seem to want to achieve their ends by means of chaos.  What’s got into them?  A cockroach or two, I suspect.’ ...Show more

Night for Day by Patrick Flanery

$37.00 NZD

Category: Fiction - Contemporary

A feverish vision of McCarthy-era Hollywood...

The Wayward Girls by Amanda Mason

$33.00 NZD

Category: Fiction - Contemporary

Postscript by Cecelia Ahern

$33.00 NZD

Category: Fiction - Contemporary | Reading Level: 1 Fiction

'We desperately need your help Holly. We're running out of ideas and...' She takes a breath in as if summoning the energy, 'all of us are running out of time.' When Holly Kennedy is approached by a group calling themselves the PS, I Love You Club, her safe existence is turned on its head. Inspired by h er late husband Gerry's letters, the club wants Holly to help them with their own parting messages for their loved ones to discover after they're gone. Holly is sure of one thing - no way is she being dragged back to the grief she has left behind. It's taken seven years to reinvent herself, and she's ready to move on with her life. But Holly comes to realize that when you love someone, there's always one more thing to say... ...Show more

Maybe the Horse Will Talk by Elliot Perlman

$37.00 NZD

Category: Fiction - Contemporary | Reading Level: 1 Fiction

'I am absolutely terrified of losing a job I absolutely hate.' Stephen Maserov has problems. A onetime teacher, married to fellow teacher Eleanor, he has retrained and is now a second-year lawyer working at mega-firm Freely Savage Carter Blanche. Despite toiling around the clock to make budget, he's in imminent danger of being downsized. And to make things worse, Eleanor, sick of single-parenting their two young children thanks to Stephen's relentless work schedule, has asked him to move out. To keep the job he hates, pay the mortgage and salvage his marriage, he will have to do something strikingly daring, something he never thought himself capable of. But if he's not careful, it might be the last job he ever has... Warm, dramatic, and at times laugh-out-loud funny, with the narrative pull of a thriller, Maybe the Horse Will Talk is a love story, a reflection on contemporary marriage, and on friendship. It is also an unflinching examination of sexual harassment in the workplace and an expose of corporate corruption that taps directly into the pulse of our times. 'Australia's outstanding social novelist' (Times Literary Supplement), Elliot Perlman '...has many things working in his favor as a novelist- curiosity, erudition, daring and a gift for seducing readers into going along with him for the ride. He'll get you where you want to go...' (Washington Post) ...Show more

The Weekend by Charlotte Wood

$33.00 NZD

Category: Fiction - Contemporary | Reading Level: 1 Fiction

People went on about death bringing friends together, but it wasn't true. The graveyard, the stony dirt - that's what it was like now. They knew each other better than their own siblings, but Sylvie's death had opened up strange caverns of distance between them. Four older women with a lifelong friends hip of the best kind: loving, practical, frank and steadfast. But when Sylvie dies, the ground shifts dangerously for the remaining three. Can they survive together without her? They are Jude, a once-famous restaurateur, Wendy, an acclaimed public intellectual, and Adele, a renowned actress now mostly out of work. Struggling to recall exactly why they've remained close all these years, the grieving women gather for Christmas at Sylvie's old beach house - not for festivities, but to clean the place out before it is sold. Without Sylvie to maintain the group's delicate equilibrium, frustrations build and painful memories press in. Fraying tempers, an elderly dog, unwelcome guests and too much wine collide in a storm that brings long-buried hurts to the surface - and threatens to sweep away their friendship for good. The Weekend explores growing old and growing up, and what happens when we're forced to uncover the lies we tell ourselves. Sharply observed and excruciatingly funny, this is a jewel of a book, a celebration of tenderness and friendship that is nothing short of a masterpiece. ...Show more

Girl Woman Other (2019 Booker Prize Winner) by Bernardine Evaristo

$40.00 NZD

Category: Fiction - Contemporary

Teeming with life and crackling with energy - a love song to modern Britain and black womanhood Girl, Woman, Other follows the lives and struggles of twelve very different characters. Mostly women, black and British, they tell the stories of their families, friends and lovers, across the country and thr ough the years. Joyfully polyphonic and vibrantly contemporary, this is a gloriously new kind of history, a novel of our times: celebratory, ever-dynamic and utterly irresistible. 'If you don't yet know her work, you should - she says things about modern Britain that no one else does' Maggie Gee, Guardian ...Show more

Little Paris Bookshop by Nina George

$35.00 NZD

Category: Fiction - Contemporary | Reading Level: very good

The international bestseller, translated from the German by Simon Pare. On a beautifully restored barge on the Seine, Jean Perdu runs a bookshop; or rather a 'literary apothecary', for this bookseller possesses a rare gift for sensing which books will soothe the troubled souls of his customers. The on ly person he is unable to cure, it seems, is himself. He has nursed a broken heart ever since the night, twenty-one years ago, when the love of his life fled Paris, leaving behind a handwritten letter that he has never dared read. His memories and his love have been gathering dust - until now. The arrival of an enigmatic new neighbour in his eccentric apartment building on Rue Montagnard inspires Jean to unlock his heart, unmoor the floating bookshop and set off for Provence, in search of the past and his beloved. ...Show more