What the Family Needed
10 best books like What the Family Needed (Steven Amsterdam): The Miniature Wife and Other Stories, Middle Men: Stories, Unpolished Gem, Cold Light, The Legacy, Autumn Laing, Blood, Foal's Bread, The Morels, Further Interpretations of Real-Life Events: Stories
| Author | Manuel Gonzales |
| ISBN | 1594486042 |
In the tradition of George Saunders and Aimee Bender, an exuberantly imagined debut that chronicles an ordinary world marked by unusual phenomena.
The eighteen stories of Manuel Gonzales’s exhilarating first book render the fantastic commonplace and the ordinary extraordinary, in...
| Author | Jim Gavin |
| ISBN | 1451649312 |
In Middle Men, Stegner Fellow and New Yorker contributor Jim Gavin delivers a hilarious and panoramic vision of California, portraying a group of men, from young dreamers to old vets, as they make valiant forays into middle-class respectability. In "Play the Man" a high-school basketball player...
After Alice Pung’s family fled to Australia from the killing fields of Cambodia, her father chose Alice as her name because he thought their new country was a Wonderland. In this lyrical, bittersweet debut memoir & already an award- winning bestseller when it was published in Australia &...
It is 1950, the League of Nations has collapsed and the newly formed United Nations has rejected all those who worked and fought for the League. Edith Campbell Berry, who joined the League in Geneva before the war, is out of a job, her vision shattered. With her sexually unconventional, husband, Ambrose,...
A WASHINGTON SQUARE PRESS PAPERBACK ORIGINAL
A thrilling and addictive novel about three unlikely friends and the web of lies that unravels after one of them goes missing.
At the center of The Legacy is the story of Julia Alpers, her friend Ralph, and the beautiful and wealthy Ingrid....
Autumn Laing has long outlived the legendary circle of artists she cultivated in the 1930s. Now 'old and skeleton gaunt', she reflects on her tumultuous relationship with the abundantly talented Pat Donlon and the effect it had on her husband, on Pat's wife and the body of work which launched Pat's career....
| Author | Tony Birch |
| ISBN | 0702239275 |
From the moment he saw her wrapped in a blanket at the hospital, Jesse knew that he’d be the one to look after his little sister. When their mother's appetite for destruction leads the little family into the arms of Ray Crow, Jesse sees the brooding violence and knows that, this time, the trouble is...
| Author | Gillian Mears |
| ISBN | 1742376290 |
The sound of horses' hooves turns hollow on the farms west of Wirri. If a man can still ride, if he hasn't totally lost the use of his legs, if he hasn't died to the part of his heart that understands such things, then he should go for a gallop. At the very least he should stand at the road by the river imagining...
The Morels─Arthur, Penny, and Will─are a happy family of three living in New York City. So why would Arthur choose to publish a book that brutally rips his tightly knit family unit apart at the seams? Arthur's old schoolmate Chris, who narrates the book, is fascinated with this very question as he...
Further Interpretations of Real-Life Events: Stories
| Author | Kevin Moffett |
| ISBN | 0062069225 |
A dazzling new story collection from brilliant, young, award-winning writer Kevin Moffett, Further Interpretations of Real-Life Events illuminates the intimate experiences of characters caught between aspiration and achievement, uncertainty and illumination, inertia and discovery, the...
| Author | Bill Cotter |
| ISBN | 1938073770 |
Justine Moppett is 34, pregnant, and fleeing an abusive relationship in New York to dig up an even more traumatic childhood in Austin. Waiting for her there is a cast of more than a dozen misfits — a hemophobic aspiring serial killer, a deranged soprano opera singer, a debt-addicted entrepreneur-cum-madam,...
When their father is critically injured, foreign correspondent Mandy and her siblings return home, bringing with them the remnants and patterns of childhood. Mandy has lived away from the country for many years. Her head is filled with images of terror and war, and her homecoming to the quiet country...
In a not-too-distant future perpetually on the brink of collapse, catastrophe is our most popular entertainment.
The energy crisis has come and gone. EcoLaw is enforced by insidious cartoon panda bears and their armies of viral-marketing children. The world watches as Pitcairn Island...
On a radiant day in Sydney, four adults converge on Circular Quay, site of the iconic Opera House and the Sydney Harbour Bridge. Crowds of tourists mix with the locals, enjoying the glorious surroundings and the play of light on water.
But each of the four carries a complicated history from elsewhere;...
| Author | Benjamin Law |
| ISBN | 1863954783 |
A vivid, gorgeously garish, Technicolor portrait of a family. It’s impossible not to let oneself go along for the ride and emerge at the book’s end enlightened, touched, thrilling with laughter.’ – Marieke Hardy
Meet the Law family – eccentric, endearing and hard to resist. Your...
| Author | Ryan O'Neill |
| ISBN | 1863958630 |
Absurd, original and highly addictive …
In Their Brilliant Careers, Ryan O’Neill has written a hilarious novel in the guise of sixteen biographies of (invented) Australian writers. Meet Rachel Deverall, who discovers the secret female source of the great literature of our time –...
| Author | Jean Thompson |
| ISBN | 0399158715 |
After surviving a shooting at her high school, Linnea is packed off to live with her estranged father, Art, who doesn’t quite understand how he has suddenly become responsible for raising a sullen adolescent girl. Art’s neighbor, Christie, is a nurse distracted by an eccentric patient, Mrs. Foster,...
| Author | Nicholson Baker |
| ISBN | 0399160965 |
cross-posted at: http://themocentricuniverse.blogspot....
i adore nicholson baker's writing voice and i really feel i can give no higher compliment than this: quite often it is how a writer's voice resonates with me that makes or breaks a novel for me; no matter what craft it might otherwise...
In early 1933, Rowland Sinclair and his companions are ensconced in the superlative luxury of The Hydro Majestic - Medlow Bath, where trouble seems distant indeed.
And then Harry Simpson vanishes.
Croquet and pre-dinner cocktails are abandoned for the High Country where Rowland...
| 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 | Alice Robinson |
| ISBN | 1922213853 |
When her mother disappears into the bush,ten-year-old Laura makes an impulsive decision that will haunt her for decades. Despite her anger and grief, she sets about running the house, taking care of her younger sister, and helping her father clear their wild acreage to carve out a farm. But gradually...
| Author | Chris Womersley |
| ISBN | 1922070513 |
Frustrated by country life and eager for adventure and excitement, eighteen-year-old Tom Button moves to the city to study. Once there, and living in a run-down apartment block called Cairo, he is befriended by an eccentric musician Max Cheever, his beautiful wife Sally, and their close-knit circle...
| Author | Alexander Söderberg |
| ISBN | 0770436056 |
Enemies Are Everywhere
When Sophie Brinkmann—nurse, widow, single mother—meets Hector Guzman, her life is uneventful. She likes his quiet charm and easy smile; she likes the way he welcomes her into his family. She quickly learns, though, that his smooth façade masks something...
Into the Woods: The Battle for Tasmania's Forests
| Author | Anna Krien |
| ISBN | 1863954872 |
For many years, the Tasmanian wilderness has been the site of a fierce struggle. At stake is the future of old-growth forests. Loggers and police face off with protesters deep in the forest, while savage political games are played in the courts and parliaments. In Into the Woods, Anna Krien, armed with...
