Trapped in a car wreck, upside down, bleeding, broken and in pain, Tristan and Grace are staring at death. As they await their fate, with only a glimmer of hope they might be seen and rescued, we discover the stories of their lives, the sequences of events that brought them together and the shocking truth behind the cause of their crash. Tristan, a brilliant student at the privileged St Augustine's school within the walls of the City, was the subject of an elaborate series of experiments on the seemingly contradictory concepts of d... read more
Port Vila Blues: Wyatt snatches the cash easily enough. He bypasses the alarm system, eludes the cops, but can he make it safely back to his bolthole in Hobart? The Fallout: Wyatt is on a boat with policewoman Liz Redding and a fortune in stolen gems. He escapes, triggering a manhunt, but who exactly is hunting him?
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The lead singer of The Birthday Party, The Bad Seeds and Grinderman, Nick Cave has been performing music for more than 30 years. He has collaborated with Kylie Minogue, PJ Harvey and many others. His album Murder Ballads has sold nearly a million copies. His debut novel, And the Ass Saw the Angel, was published by Black Spring/Penguin in 1989 and has sold more than 100,000 copies. Born in Australia, Cave now lives in Brighton, England. FROM THE BOOK: 'I am damned,' thinks Bunny Munro in a sudden moment of self-awareness reserved fo... read more
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New ISBN for PB edition - 1869690885, to be published September 2004. A collection of short stories by the only New Zealand writer to win the Pegasus Prize for Maori Literature and the Booker Prize. '... The scallops arranged in the spider lambis were succulently decadent. A bottle of rare wine had been reduced to its essence and sprinkled over the raw bodies, and rough salt, and finely-chopped redware. The flush of the shell echoed visually the wine and the seaweed, and although there were but five scallops, they were truly sweet ... read more
A new addition to the thought-provoking collection of Spinifex feminist classics, this award-winning novel by New Zealand novelist Beryl Fletcher explores the themes and contradictions of contemporary women's lives in a vivid and memorable setting. How do you decide how to live? Or do others make that decision for you? In this lyrical novel, Beryl Fletcher explores the paradoxes of modern life. As a new academic, Julia finds her beliefs challenged by her students, reinforced by her friends mistreatment and dismissed by her family. ... read more
This fast-paced, moving novel is set in two contrasting worlds: the rich, horse-breeding milieu of Riley Chadwick and his family; and the hand-to-mouth life on the street of Lu and her mates. What happens when those worlds collide?
Salander is plotting her revenge - against the man who tried to kill her, and against the government institutions that very nearly destroyed her life. But it is not going to be a straightforward campaign. After taking a bullet to the head, Salander is under close supervision in Intensive Care, and is set to face trial for three murders and one attempted murder on her eventual release. With the help of journalist Mikael Blomkvist and his researchers at Millennium magazine, Salander must not only prove her innocence, but identify and... read more
Jennifer Egan's spellbinding novel circles the lives of Bennie Salazar, an aging former punk rocker and record executive, and Sasha, the passionate, troubled young woman he employs. Although Bennie and Sasha never discover each other's pasts, the reader does, in intimate detail, along with the secret lives of a host of other characters whose paths intersect with theirs, over many years, in locales as varied as New York, San Francisco, Naples, and Africa. We first meet Sasha in her mid-thirties, on her therapist's couch in New York ... read more
Young marine lieutenant, Waino Mellas, and his comrades in Bravo Company have been dropped into the mountain jungle of Vietnam, combatants in an increasingly desperate war. Standing in their way are the North Vietnamese, the monsoon rain and mud, leeches and tigers, and disease and malnutrition. As racial tension and competing ambition build, the group threatens to crack at any moment. When the company is surrounded and outnumbered by a massive enemy regiment, the Marines are thrust into the raw and all-consuming terror of c... read more
Short-listed for the 2010 man Booker Prize.
A young man takes three journeys, through Greece, India and Africa. He travels lightly, simply. To those who travel with him and those whom he meets on the way - including a handsome, enigmatic stranger, a group of careless backpackers and a woman on the edge - he is the Follower, the Lover and the Guardian. Yet, despite the man's best intentions, each journey ends in disaster. Together, these three journeys will change his whole life.
A novel of longing and thw... read more
Beatrice Hempel, English teacher, is the sort of teacher students adore.Ms Hempel Chronicles is a warm-hearted novel about a young woman navigating her way into adulthood as she ushers her students into adolescence. Ms Beatrice Hempel, English teacher, is new
In a room above a bizarre German museum, and far from the prying eyes of strangers, lives the Old Man. Caretaker of the museum by day, by night he enjoys the sound of silence, broken by the occasional crunch of a spider between his blackened teeth. Little Hands Clapping brings together the Old Man with the respectable Doctor Ernst Frohlicher, his greedy dog Hans and a cast of grotesque and hilarious townsfolk, all of whose lives are thrown together as the town uncovers a crime so outrageous that it will shock the world. From its si... read more
Summoned to the trailer of a Hollywood star who's receiving death threats, former stuntman-turned-private investigator, David Spandau, assumes this will be another routine case. It turns out to be anything but. A-list actor Bobby Dye has become entangled with B-list gangster Richie Stella, who just wants to make a movie -- and you can't make a movie without a star. But as Richie and his cohorts are about to find out, the movie business makes the cocaine and heroin racket look like child's play. Meanwhile, Spandau finds himself draw... read more
1067. In the desolate wastes of Greenland, a band of hunters discover a strangely-shaped meteor which has fallen from the sky. At first, the mysterious 'sky-stone' seems to bring good luck, healing a lame boy and guaranteeing a good catch of furs. But violence and murder soon follow in fortune's wake as the villagers fight and struggle among themselves to get control of the precious stone. Over the next six hundred years, the Sky-Stone falls into the hands of crusading knights, the wicked Sheriff of Devon, a group of radical young... read more
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This is a Serpent's Tail lead crime novel. Reminiscent of early John Grisham and Walter Mosley, this taut, fast-paced novel heralds an exciting and powerful new voice in fiction. Big oil and its twin, corporate corruption, meet their match with Jay Porter, a struggling personal injury attorney down on his luck, who suddenly finds himself in a situation spiralling out of control. Jay knows a boat ride on the Bayou won't measure up to his wife's expectations of a birthday celebration, but it's all he can afford. Once a man of virtuou... read more
Louisiana, 1704, and France is clinging on to a swampy corner of the New World with only a few hundred men. Into this precarious situation arrive Elizabeth Savaret, one of a group of young women sent from Paris to provide wives for the colonists, and Auguste Guichard, the only ship's boy to survive the crossing. Elizabeth brings with her a green-silk quilt and a volume of Montaigne's essays; August brings nothing but an aptitude for botany and languages. Each has to build a life, Elizabeth among the feckless inhabitants of Mobile w... read more
'The mind is a time machine that travels backwards in memory and forwards in prophecy, but he has done with prophecy now...' Sequestered in his blitz-battered Regent's Park house in 1944, the ailing Herbert George Wells, 'H.G.' to his family and friends, looks back on a life crowded with incident, books, and women. Has it been a success or a failure? Once he was the most famous writer in the world, 'the man who invented tomorrow'; now he feels like yesterday's man, deserted by readers and depressed by the collapse of his uto... read more
