The inspirational tale of a self-obsessed writer who finds himself caught up in the extraordinary stories of young immigrant girls in Sweden.
In The Shadow Girls, Henning Mankell tells the extraordinary stories of three young women who are determined to overcome the hardships they face to take control of their own lives. This inspiring novel encompasses both humour and tragedy and illuminates our understanding of those left on the fringes of society.
Geneva, 2012. When a Russian intelligence officer approaches MI6 with vital information about the imminent cyber-sabotage of an Anglo-American Defence programme, he refuses to talk to anyone but Liz Carlyle of MI5. But who is he, and what is his connection to the British intelligence officer? As Liz and her team hunt for a mole inside the MOD, the trail leads them from Geneva, to Marseilles and into a labyrinth of international intrigue, in a race against time to stop the Cold War heating up once again…
Author Note: Dame Stella Rimington joined the Security Service (MI5) in 1968. During her career she worked in all the main fields of the Service: counter-subversion, counter-espionage and counter-terrorism. She was appointed Director General in 1992, the first woman to hold the post. She has written her autobiography and five Liz Carlyle novels. She lives in London and Norfolk.
Harry Bosch links the bullet from a recent crime to a file from 1992, the killing of a young female photographer during the L.A. riots. Harry originally investigated the murder, but it was then handed off to the Riot Crimes Task Force and never solved.
Now Bosch’s ballistics match indicates that her death was not random violence, but something more personal, and connected to a deeper intrigue. Like an investigator combing through the wreckage after a plane crash, Bosch searches for the “black box,” the one piece of evidence that will pull the case together.
Riveting and relentlessly paced, THE BLACK BOX leads Harry Bosch, “one of the greats of crime fiction” (New York Daily News), into one of his most fraught and perilous cases.
Award-winning journalists Steve Lewis of News Ltd and Chris Uhlmann from the ABC combine forces in this arresting novel that proves fiction is stranger than fact.
THE book’s blurb says it’s a romp through the “dark underbelly of politics” and for once the blurb doesn’t lie.
The Marmalade Files is a banquet of bastardry. There are fixers and spinners, thugs and hypocrites, treachery and hatred. Lewis and Uhlmann take a swag of cheeky liberties, starting with the background of a barely surviving minority Labor government.
They craft characters who are irresistibly recognisable and then muddy the waters, sometimes through a sex change. Take Cate “Attila the Hen” Bailey. She is fluent in Mandarin, has a work ethic bordering on the demented and is socially autistic. She talks in “wonk-strine” and became Australia’s first woman prime minister with, for a while, stratospheric approval ratings. But her fall was swift and cruel.
The main plot centres on journalist Harry Dunkley’s search for a Walkley Award-winning story after a mysterious photograph comes into his possession.
Journalists cop almost as big a hiding as the politicians do. The end, after a murder and some steamy sex, is a tease and leaves the door open for a sequel.
VERDICT: Cavalcade of caricatures
Available in BLRC: F LEW
Winner of the 2010 Edgar Award for Best Novel
Thirteen year-old Johnny Merrimon had the perfect life: a warm home and loving parents; a twin sister, Alyssa, with whom he shared an irreplaceable bond. He knew nothing of loss, until the day Alyssa vanished from the side of a lonely street. Now, a year later, Johnny finds himself isolated and alone, failed by the people he’d been taught since birth to trust. No one else believes that Alyssa is still alive, but Johnny is certain that she is—confident in a way that he can never fully explain.Determined to find his sister, Johnny risks everything to explore the dark side of his hometown. Traveling the wilderness between innocence and hard wisdom, between hopelessness and faith, The Last Child leaves all categories behind and establishes John Hart as a writer of unique power.
Available in BLRC: F HAR
Richard Ford’s magnificent, compassionate, strangely languorous new novel begins with a crafty come-on: “First, I’ll tell about the robbery our parents committed. Then about the murders, which happened later.” That’s quite some opener. What follows is not a Bonnie and Clyde-style adventure, but a far more ruminative affair about the imperceptible slide from normal to not normal, edging towards the point of no return. If that’s mildly disappointing, he more than makes up for it in the bitter fallout from physical actions.
Ford’s genius at capturing human frailty and its pitiful disguises burns through this novel, from Dell and Berner’s visit to their parents in jail, when their father insists on keeping up his ordinary banter, to Dell’s final meeting with his sister, to whom the hippie lifestyle has not been kind. In the end, though, the pieces of the whole are not separable. Keeping everything together, achieving a sort of completeness and purity that does indeed recall those great fictional forebears, is the novel’s outstanding feat.
Available in BLRC: F FOR
Winner of the highly prestigious Children’s Literature Prize (Jugendliteraturpreis) in 2011
An intelligent computer game with a disturbing agenda.”
When 16-year-old Nick gets a package, he wonders if it will explain the behavior of his classmates, who have been secretive lately. The package contains the mysterious computer game Erebos. Players must obey strict rules: always play alone, never talk about the game, and never tell anyone your nickname.
Curious, Nick joins the game and quickly becomes addicted. But Erebos knows a lot about the players and begins to manipulate their lives. When it sends Nick on a deadly assignment, he refuses and is banished from the game.
Now unable to play, Nick turns to a friend for help in finding out who controls the game. The two set off on a dangerous mission in which the border between reality and the virtual world begins to blur.
This utterly convincing and suspenseful thriller originated in Germany where it has become a runaway bestseller.
Available in BLRC: F POZ
A New York Times Bestseller and Pulitzer Prize Winner
This modern-day tale of an unlikely hero takes readers on the dark journey of a contemporary immigrant.
The novel’s main character, Oscar de Léon, is a “ghetto nerd” from a family of immigrants from the Dominican Republic. Plagued by the fukú curse brought upon the aboriginal people of the Americas by Christopher Columbus, Oscar portrays himself as a hero in search of his personal Grail—a “pure and unadulterated love.” Obsessed with science fiction and fantasy, Oscar is alienated in his lower-class community. Throughout high school, and into his teaching career, he is the victim of the narrow perspectives of those without his imagination and vision.
Told from the point of view of Oscar’s sister Lola and his best friend Yunior, this tale of the search for redemption leads the reader through the darkest corners of a country under dictatorial control. Lola seeks her own redemption, away from her family and her heritage. She loves only her younger brother Oscar and seeks to protect him from the curse that tragically affects their family.
Yunior, his best friend and college roommate, does not quite understand Oscar, yet loves him just the same and sees that there is something within Oscar that begs to be understood. As the primary narrator of the novel, Yunior provides a loving portrait of a tortured soul within a tortured family. The redemption of Oscar’s “brief wondrous life” comes at a significant, but justified, price.
Available in BLRC: F DIA
A surprisingly beautiful evocation of horror and brutality, The Roving Party is a meditation on the intricacies of human nature at its most raw. Winner of the 2011 The Australian/Vogel’s Literary Award.
1829, Tasmania
John Batman, ruthless, singleminded; four convicts, the youngest still only a stripling; Gould, a downtrodden farmhand; two free black trackers; and powerful, educated Black Bill, brought up from childhood as a white man. This is the roving party and their purpose is massacre.
With promises of freedom, land grants and money, each is willing to risk his life for the prize.
Passing over many miles of tortured country, the roving party searches for Aborigines, taking few prisoners and killing freely, Batman never abandoning the visceral intensity of his hunt. And all the while, Black Bill pursues his personal quarry, the much-feared warrior, Manalargena.
Available in BLRC: F WIL
A New York Times bestseller!
Henry Lee is still mourning the death of his wife when he learns that the belongings of Japanese Americans hidden in the basement of Seattle’s Panama Hotel for decades have been discovered. Henry is drawn to the basement, and what he’s searching for there opens a door he thought he had closed forever. The story switches back and forth between 1986 and the 1940s, when a 12-year-old Henry attending an American school (he’s “scholarshipping” as his father likes to say) meets another international student working in the school kitchen. Keiko is Japanese American, the enemy according to Henry’s father, but the two become best friends before her family is imprisoned in one of the relocation camps.
This book does a phenomenal job exploring the history and attitudes of this time period, and Ford’s portrayal of Seattle’s ethnic neighborhoods is amazing. But really, the thing that pulled me into this novel the most was the richness of the relationships — Henry and Keiko, Henry and his father, Henry’s mother and his father, and Henry and his own son. HOTEL ON THE CORNER OF BITTER AND SWEET looks at the best and worst of human relationships, the way we regard others, the way we find ourselves reenacting our relationships with our parents with our own children, the choices we make along the way. Mostly, though, this book reminds us that there is always room — and time — for forgiveness and redemption.
Available in BLRC: F FOR