The Heart Broke In

Author

Anne-Marie Kinney

Radio Iris follows Iris Finch, a twenty-something socially awkward daydreamer and receptionist at Larmax, Inc., a company whose true function she doesn't understand (though she's heard her boss refer to himself as "a businessman").

Gradually, her boss' erratic behavior becomes even...

Author	John Brandon
ISBN	1936365731

On the top floor of a small hospital, an unlikely piano prodigy lies in a coma, attended to by his gruff, helpless father. Outside the clinic, a motley vigil assembles beneath a reluctant New Mexico winter—strangers in search of answers, a brush with the mystical, or just an escape. To some the boy is...

Author	Don Lee
ISBN	0393083217

A sparkling bildungsroman about friendship and betrayal, art and race.

In 1988, Eric Cho, an aspiring writer, arrives at Macalester College. On his first day he meets a beautiful fledgling painter, Jessica Tsai, and another would-be novelist, the larger-than-life Joshua Yoon. Brilliant,...

Author	Keith Ridgway
ISBN	1847085261

The two protagonists of the title are mid-ranking policemen operating amongst London's criminal classes, but each is plagued by dreams of elsewhere and, in the case of Hawthorn, a nightlife of visceral intensity that sits at odds with his carefully-composed placid family mask but has the habit of...

Author	Sergio de la Pava
ISBN	1436341981

Casi is a hotshot public defender working on the front line of America’s War on Drugs. So far he’s on the winning side. He’s never lost a case. But nothing lasts forever, and pride like his has a long way to fall.

Funny, smart and always surprising, A Naked Singularity speaks a language all...

Author	Annalena McAfee
ISBN	1846554357

There are two sides to every story.

Two women journalists - one old, one young, one a veteran war correspondent, the other a writer of celebrity gossip - meet for the first time. It is January 1997, the dying days of John Major's government, and newspapers, fighting for a dwindling readership,...

Author	Kathleen Alcott
ISBN	1590515293

An extraordinary debut novel that challenges the definition of family and explores the intricate ties that bind us together

Ida grew up with Jackson and James—where there was “I” there was a “J.” She can’t recall a time when she didn’t have them around, whether in their early...

Author	Cate Kennedy
ISBN	1922070068

From prize-winning short-story writer Cate Kennedy comes a new collection to rival her highly acclaimed Dark Roots. In Like a House on Fire, Kennedy once again takes ordinary lives and dissects their ironies, injustices and pleasures with her humane eye and wry sense of humour. In ‘Laminex and Mirrors’,...

Author

Pat Grant

Pat Grant’s Blue sees an Aussie man reminiscing on his adolescence – before THEY came. The aliens (a stand-in for immigrants) who took over the white population and brought their own culture with them – how this Aussie oik hates multi-culturalism and racial diversity! He also recounts the time...

Author	Jess Richards
ISBN	1443410144

Set on an isolated island off the Scottish coast, in a community run by women who are in awe of a mysterious structure called the Thrashing House, the novel is narrated by two teenage girls in very different circumstances. Mary is doing her best to protect her younger brother, Barney, as the island’s...

Author	Stephen May
ISBN	1620400014

Billy's mother is dead. He knows-because he reads about it in magazines-that people die every day in ways that are more random and tragic and stupid than hers, but for nineteen-year-old Billy and his little brother, Oscar, their mother's death in a bungled street robbery is the most random and tragic...

Author	Howard Jacobson
ISBN	1408828685

Novelist Guy Ableman is in thrall to his vivacious wife Vanessa, a strikingly beautiful red-head, contrary, highly strung and blazingly angry. The trouble is, he is no less in thrall to her alluring mother, Poppy. More like sisters than mother and daughter, they come as a pair, a blistering presence...

Author	John Freeman
ISBN	1921922680

John Freeman, author and editor of Granta magazine, has interviewed nearly every name in fiction and the literary world. In this collection Freeman has compiled the most insightful and fascinating of his interviews, essays and articles.

In How to Read a Novelist we encounter Paul Theroux...

Author	Susan Johnson
ISBN	1741756359

I enjoyed My Hundred Lovers. I recommend it to anyone who feels a little pale and dusty. There is life in these pages, enough, in fact, to take deep, invigorating draughts without exhausting the supply. I felt I was being invited into secret places, but not foreign places. Susan examines emotions, sensations...

Author

Alan Warner

It is the early 1970s in the Highlands of Scotland and for 16-year-old Simon Crimmons there's really not much to do. He can hang around with his pals or his first-ever girlfriend, Nikki, he can dream about a first motorbike to get him out of the Port and among the hills, but in truth he's going nowhere.

The...

Author	John Ironmonger
ISBN	0297866095

Maximilian Ponder shut himself away for thirty years in an attempt to record every memory he ever had. Now he lies dead, surrounded by his magnum opus - The Catalogue - an exhaustive set of notebooks and journals that he hopes will form the map of one human mind. But before his friend Adam Last can call the...

Author	Benjamin Wood
ISBN	0771089317

Bright, bookish Oscar Lowe has made a life for himself amid the colleges and spires of Cambridge and yet is a world apart from the students who study in the hallowed halls. He has come to love the quiet routine of his job as a care assistant at a nursing home, where he has forged a close relationship with its...

Author	Frank B. Wilderson III
ISBN	0822346923

Red, White & Black is a provocative critique of socially engaged films and related critical discourse. Offering an unflinching account of race and representation, Frank B. Wilderson III asks whether such films accurately represent the structure of U.S. racial antagonisms. That structure,...

Author	I.J. Kay
ISBN	0670023671

A highly original novel about a young woman’s journey from shattered youth to self-discovery

After ten years in a London prison, Louise Adler (Lulu) is released with only a new alias to rebuild her life. Working a series of dead-end jobs, she carries a past full of secrets: a childhood marked...

Author	Amalie Skram
ISBN	0810119676

Initially rejected by the author's scandalized publisher, Constance Ring is now considered a classic of Scandinavian-and world-literature, a passionate condemnation of marriage and moral hypocrisy that has drawn comparisons to Madame Bovary and The Awakening. The story of a naive young woman...

Author	Richard Kramer
ISBN	1609531019

These Things Happen is set in Manhattan and focuses on two couples – one gay, one straight. They share a 15-year-old son, Wesley, who lives on the upper East Side with his mother and doctor stepfather. Trying to get to know his impressive, distant father better, he moves in for a semester with him his...

Author	Jennifer Skiff
ISBN	1451621574

From the bestselling author of God Stories, an uplifting collection of inspirational and heartwarming stories from people who have encountered the divine through their dogs.

“My dogs have been the reason I have woken up every single day of my life with a smile on my face. I am among the ranks...

Author

Jane Caro

Early in September 2012, commentator Alan Jones, responding to a comment by Prime Minister Julia Gillard, said: ‘[Gillard] said that “We know societies only reach their full potential if women are politically participating”. Women are destroying the joint – Christine Nixon in Melbourne,...

Author	Raúl Zurita
ISBN	0520259734

Raúl Zurita’s Purgatory, a landmark in contemporary Latin American poetry, records the physical, cultural, and spiritual violence perpetrated against the Chilean people under Pinochet’s military dictatorship (1973–1990) in the fiercely inventive voice of a postmodern master. This...

Author	P.G. Wodehouse
ISBN	0257659447

Freddie Widgeon is in the chips— or expects to be very shortly. After months of slaving in a solicitor's office, he can now count the days to when he will be able to strike off the shackles of Messrs. Shoesmith, Shoes mith, Shoesmith and Shoe-smith for ever. The author of Freddie's gratifying swing of...