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Jeff Lindsay –

Hollywood gets more than it bargained for when television’s hottest star arrives at the Miami Police Department and develops an intense, professional interest in a camera-shy blood spatter analyst named Dexter Morgan. Mega-star Robert Chase is famous for losing himself in his characters. When he and a group of actors descend on the Miami Police Department for “research,” Chase becomes fixated on Dexter Morgan, the blood spatter analyst with a sweet tooth for doughnuts and a seemingly average life.

To perfect his role, Chase is obsessed with shadowing Dexter’s every move and learning what really makes him tick. There is just one tiny problem. Dexter’s favorite hobby involves hunting down the worst killers to escape legal justice, and introducing them to his special brand of playtime. It’s a secret best kept out of the spotlight and away from the prying eyes of bloated Hollywood egos if Dexter wants to stay out of the electric chair. The last thing he needs is bright lights and the paparazzi, but even Dexter isn’t immune to the call of fame.

Jeff Lindsay’s razor sharp, devilish wit, and immaculate pacing prove that he is in a class of his own, and this new novel is his most masterful creation yet.

Fleur McDonald –

Laura Murphy will need to call on all her grit and determination to retain her beloved farm… But will her fierce self reliance close her off to the possibility of love? Since inheriting Nambina, the property that’s been in her family for generations, Laura Murphy has worked wonders. Rather than just focus on farming she has set up a successful school, teaching women the basics of managing a property – from fencing and mustering to handling the financial side of the business. But the notoriously self-reliant Laura is lonely and still scarred by a tragedy from her past. She’s also grappling with the hostility of her nearest neighbour and former best friend, Meghan Hunter. The fact that Laura’s ex-boyfriend Josh is Meghan’s brother only makes things worse.
When a solicitor contacts Laura saying his clients may have a claim over Nambina, her entire world is turned upside down, and she has to call on all her determination to hold on to the property she’s worked so hard to build. In the process she realises she must reach out to friends and loved ones or risk losing everything.
By the bestselling author of Red Dust, this inspirational novel celebrates strength in the face of adversity as well as the enriching power of love.

This warm, gentle novel reads like a love letter to bookshops. It follows the life of A.J. Fikry, a man who is left as the sole owner of a small bookstore after his young wife tragically dies in a car accident. A.J. is drowning his sorrows in alcohol, alienating everyone in his life and doing a pretty bad job of running his business when an unexpected turn of events changes everything – a two-year-old girl, Maya, is abandoned in his store. His life becomes entwined with Maya’s, and the novel follows them over the ensuing years.

This is a charming tale of the small moments in one man’s life. A.J. and his friends grapple with grief, fall in love, build unconventional families and find solace in literature. There is no high drama, but journeying through these everyday moments makes for comforting, and surprisingly compelling, reading.

One of the main themes of the narrative is the importance of books to each character. The novel is filled with discussions of contemporary literature, and devoted readers (especially those who spend a lot of time in bookshops, and belong to book clubs) will find much to enjoy. Sentimental but not cloying,  this book is a feel-good story (the kind that just might reduce you to weeping in its final chapters). The less you expect from this quiet book, the more you’ll find.

Garry Disher –

Gunshots have been reported just out of town and Constable Paul Hirschhausen is sent to investigate. Back in uniform, he runs a one-man cop shop in Tiverton, a bump-on-the-highway town three hours from Adelaide. If things go bad out on Bitter Wash Road his nearest backup would be his boss, Sergeant Kropp, and a couple of constables 40km away in Redruth. But the Redruth constables have made it clear they consider him a dog and a maggot. Cop logic says if the rest of his squad went down for corruption and he didn’t, then he must have survived by selling out his mates. They reckon Hirsch has a bullet coming and it can’t come soon enough to suit them – a pistol cartridge left in his mailbox makes that clear.

Hirsch covers his patch in a four-wheel-drive police-issue Toyota Hilux, casually raising a finger off the steering wheel to acknowledge oncoming drivers. We never sight a kangaroo but Disher puts us dead centre in rural Australia with that casual, iconic gesture. In Tiverton and its surrounds and people, Disher has drawn both a vivid and visceral picture of a backblocks bush town, its inhabitants ground down by the stresses of isolation, hard work and irregular, relentlessly shrinking incomes.

The next call-out takes Hirsch to a real crime: a body, female, dumped beside the highway – 16-year-old local girl Melia Donovan. His investigation of Melia’s death leads Hirsch on a trail of corruption and intrigue, with echoes of the past and bent cops that he’d prefer to leave behind. The story pulls no punches, with Hirsch uncovering a complicated web of cronyism, corruption, racism, infidelity, misogyny, rape and murder – Disher never letting up on the pace.

There is a lot to like in this story, with several unexpected and surprising changes in direction combined with Disher’s usual deft plotting and economically drawn but fully fleshed out main and peripheral characters. What resonates most however is Hirschhausen’s painful sense of isolation within an already isolated community. The corruption case in Adelaide ended his marriage, though he knows no copper’s relationship could ever survive a posting to Tiverton.

The role of lone cop in a small town sets Hirsch up as a protector, of course, but also as a father figure – the adolescents and young adults who populate the story are beautifully realised characters in all their naivety and surliness, and Hirsch’s interactions with them show a different, gentler side to his character.

Professor Earl Owen –

Under the Microscope is the story of an extraordinary man, his many life-changing inventions, and his exceptional life and special friendships. Born into a family of doctors – on the paternal and maternal sides – with a birth defect that no one knew how to treat, Earl Owen was given a dose of radiation before anyone knew what radiation treatment could do to a human body, let alone a newborn baby. Earl Owen’s medical parents, aunts and uncles failed to notice that as he grew he walked with a limp and when he was eleven he had an accident in a school race, which left him in hospital for a year enduring a series of excruciating surgeries in an attempt to remedy his damaged bones.

Whilst lying in bed alone in a dark basement room in the hospital, he decided he would grow up to be a new kind of surgeon – one who would deal delicately and carefully with birth defects and would communicate sensitively with patients.

When he was discharged from the hospital he took up piano lessons and discovered he was a talented musician. As he came out of his teens, he had to decide whether to pursue a career as a concert pianist or a surgeon. To say this man is a high achiever barely touches on his gifts and talents. He was one of the earliest, most inventive and enterprising pioneers of microsurgery; he designed instruments and microscopes for his operations; he did the first finger replacement on a child (for which he was sacked from the Sydney Children’s Hospital, even though it was successful operation); co-led the team that completed the first successful hand transplant (whose recipient turned out to be an ex-con from New Zealand, who had lost his arm in jail); and trained the team that completed the first double-hand transplant. Earl Owen was the first surgeon to be able to reverse vasectomies and complete fallopian tube ligatures (using his microsurgical prowess).

And he designed the chairs in the Sydney Opera House! He has done more in his eighty years than most of us could dream of, and this book is his story in his words.

Josh Ruxin –

One couple’s inspiring memoir of healing a Rwandan village, raising a family near the old killing fields, and building a restaurant named Heaven. Newlyweds Josh and Alissa were at a party and received a challenge that shook them to the core: do you think you can really make a difference? Especially in a place like Rwanda, where the scars of genocide linger and poverty is rampant?

While Josh worked hard bringing food and health care to the country’s rural villages, Alissa was determined to put their foodie expertise to work. The couple opened Heaven, a gourmet restaurant overlooking Kigali, which became an instant success. Remarkably, they found that between helping youth marry their own local ingredients with gourmet recipes (and mix up “the best guacamole in Africa”) and teaching them how to help themselves, they created much-needed jobs while showing that genocide’s survivors really could work together.

While first a memoir of love, adventure, and family, A THOUSAND HILLS TO HEAVEN also provides a remarkable view of how, through health, jobs, and economic growth, our foreign aid programs can be quickly remodelled and work to end poverty worldwide.

Richard Poplak –

What happens to our pop culture when it meets another culture head-on—especially one that according to some is completely at odds with our own?

In The Sheikh’s Batmobile, pop-cultural commentator Richard Poplak sets out on an unusual two-year odyssey. His mission is to see what becomes of his, and North America’s, obsessions—pop songs and sitcoms, Hollywood movies and shoot-em-up video games, muscle cars and punk music—when they make their way into the Muslim world. Over the course of his journey, Poplak is body slammed by WWE fans in Afghanistan, hangs out with hip-hop artists in Palestine, head bangs to heavy metal in Cairo, discovers a world of extreme makeovers in Beirut, bowls with the chief of police in small-town Kazakhstan, and encounters a mysterious Texan building rocket-propelled batmobiles for a clientele of sheikhs.

With uproarious humour and keen cultural insight, Poplak asks some vital questions: How is American pop culture consumed and reinterpreted in the Islamic world? What does that say about how we are viewed by young Muslims? And can Homer Simpson bridge the differences that are tearing our world apart?

David Van –

If you’ve ever owned a sailboat or had a friend who did, you know how it begins: with a dream. You dream about the ship, and gradually the dream consumes you. Practical considerations lose all meaning … until, inevitably, the dream morphs into a nightmare.

David Vann is familiar with that nightmare. His begins in Turkey: a thirty-year-old tourist, he stumbles across the steel frame of a ninety-foot sailboat that cries out to be built. From friends, family, and credit cards, he borrows the $150,000 to construct the ship. The Turkish builders take shameless advantage of him, eventually charging him over $500,000.

On the edge of financial ruin, Vann starts a chartering business. But, when some new part of the ship isn’t falling apart, he encounters freak storms. As his debts escalate, Vann begins to wonder if he is merely repeating his father’s dreams and failures at sea—which ended with his father’s suicide.

At once a page-turning true story of adventure on the open ocean and an archetypal tale of one man’s attempt to overcome fate and realize his dream, A Mile Down is an unforgettable story of struggle and redemption by a writer at the top of his form.

Mark Juddery –

With conflicts around the globe, rampant environmental damage, economic struggles, poverty and the ongoing threat of terrorism, the world isn’t perfect right now. But is everything really going to hell in a hand basket? Should we really be feeling so miserable?

Best Times Ever briefly assesses 100 of our favourite things to complain about, and explains why, believe it or not, things aren’t as bad as they used to be. In fact, we’re actually improving!

From the serious (the number of people dying in wars is 2,000 a year; in the 1950s, it was 65,000 a year) to the frivolous (Vertigo had bad reviews in 1957, was considered a cinema classic by 1987, and was recently voted the greatest movie ever made – so even movies get better), this is an optimistic answer to those who say that everything is getting worse.

There is room for improvement, but we’re heading in the right direction! Humorous, light reading, but peppered with useful information and trivia and an all round uplifting message.

P.J. O’Rourke –

O’Rourke began writing funny things in 1960s “underground” newspapers, became editor-in-chief of National Lampoon, then spent 20 years reporting for Rolling Stone and The Atlantic Monthly as the world’s only trouble spot humorist, going to wars, riots, rebellions, and other “Holidays in Hell” in more than 40 countries.

Now O’Rourke, born at the peak of the Baby Boom, turns his keen eye on himself and his 75 million accomplices in making America what it is today. With laughter as an analytical tool, he uses his own very average, if sometimes uproarious experiences as a key to his exceptional age cohort. He writes about the way the post-war generation somehow came of age by never quite growing up and created a better society by turning society upside down.

THE BABY BOOM: How it Got That Way… And It Wasn’t My Fault… And I’ll Never Do It Again, is at once a social history, a group memoir of collectively impaired memory, a hilarious attempt to understand his generation’s messy hilarity, and a celebration of the mess the Baby Boom has made.