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December Book News (Updated 21/12/08) | | | 
| The Girl Who Played with Fire
Lisbeth Salander is a wanted woman. Two Millennium journalists about to expose the truth about the sex trafficking trade are murdered and Salander's prints are on the weapon. Her history of unpredictable and vengeful behaviour makes her an official danger to society - but no-one can find her.Mikael Blomkvist, editor-in-chief of Millennium, does not believe the police. Using all his magazine staff and resources to prove Salander's innocence, Blomkvist also uncovers her terrible past, spent in criminally corrupt institutions. Yet Salander is more avenging angel than helpless victim. She may be an expert at staying out of sight - but she has ways of tracking down her most elusive enemies. 
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| Holidays on Ice
David Sedaris' beloved holiday collection is new again with six more pieces, including a never before published story. Along with such favourites as the diaries of a Macy's elf and the annals of two very competitive families, are Sedaris' tales of tardy trick-or-treaters (Us and Them) the difficulties of explaining the Easter bunny to the French (Jesus Shaves) what to do when you've been locked out in a snowstorm (Let it Snow) the puzzling Christmas traditions of other nations (Six to Eight Black Men) what Hallowe'en looks like at the medical examiner's office (The Monster Mash) and a barnyard Secret Santa scheme gone awry (Cow and Turkey). No Matter what your favourite holiday, you won't want to miss celebrating with the writer who has been called 'one of the funniest writers alive' - The Economist |
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| Let's Get Fancy Together!
No-one knows fancy like Nancy! Now, for the first time EVER, Fancy Nancy offers her advice on how to transform anything that's simply plain into something exquisite. Share Nancy's secret tips for instant glamourfication - from hair and sunglasses to dolls and party invitations! It's a must have kit for girls on the go, because you never know where you'll be when you suddenly need to get fancy! In a cute handbag shape, you can carry your fancy kit wherever you go. Includes hair slides, sequins, a very fancy fan, a crown and more! |
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| Outliers
Why do some people achieve so much more than others? Can they lie so far outside the ordinary? What is the secret of their success?
In this provocative and inspiring book, Malcolm Gladwell examines everyone from business giants to scientific geniuses, sports stars to musicians, and reveals what they have in common. He looks behind the spectacular results, the myths and the legends to show what really explains exceptionally successful people.
Gladwell argues that, when we try to understand success, we normally start with the wrong question. We ask 'what is this person like?' when we should really be asking 'where are they from?' The real secret of success turns out to be surprisingly simple, and it hinges on a few crucial twists in people's life stories – on the culture they grow up in and the way they spend their time.
What does Bill Gates have in common with the Beatles? How does your IQ relate to your salary? What can a linguist tell us about airline safety? How does the way your child speaks to an adult affect their success in life? What do rice paddies have to do with maths results? And how can you predict a maths star without even making them take a test? Malcolm Gladwell has the answers.
This book really will change the way you think about your life. And it will challenge you to make the most of your own potential. |
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| The American Future
In November 2008 the United States will elect a new President. But the imminent collapse of twenty years of Republican conservativism means the country is already conducting an intense self-examination about the trajectory of its history; how it came to find itself in multiple crises and how an America that began as 'the last best hope for mankind' came to be so suspected and vilified around much of the world.
THE AMERICAN FUTURE: A HISTORY, written by an author who has spent half his life there, takes the long view of how the United States has come to this anguished moment of truth about its own identity as a nation and its place in the world. In each of the chapters devoted to the most compelling issues facing Americans now - the projection of power ("American war") ; race, immigration and the problematic promise of e pluribus unum ("American skin"); the intensity of religious conviction in public life and the peculiar interdependence of piety and profanity ("American fervour") ; the mystique of American land (from Jefferson to Ansel Adams) ("American Space") and its battles with the imperatives of profit, Schama traces the deep history of the present crisis.
Cumulatively the chapters build into a history of American exceptionalism - the 'American difference' that means so much to its people but which has led it into calamities as well as triumphs. One of those differences historically has been the capacity to renew and rebuild the nation at times when it seemed overwhelmed by disaster. 1932 and 1976 were such moments; 2008 will be another, when the fate of America, and by extension the world, will be hanging in the balance. THE AMERICAN FUTURE: A HISTORY argues that if you want to know what is truly at stake, you need to absorb these stories and understand this history - for understanding is the condition of hope.
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| Wishful Drinking
In WISHFUL DRINKING, Carrie Fisher tells the true and intoxicating story of her life with inimitable wit. Born to celebrity parents, she was picked to play a princess in a little movie called Star Wars when only 19 years old. But it isn't all sweetness and light sabres. Alas, aside from a demanding career and her role as a single mother (not to mention the hyperspace hairdo), Carrie also spends her free time battling addiction, weathering the wild ride of manic depression and lounging around various mental institutions. It's an incredible tale - from having Elizabeth Taylor as a stepmother, to marrying (and divorcing) Paul Simon, from having the father of her daughter leave her for a man, to ultimately waking up one morning and finding a friend dead beside her in bed. |
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| The Irregulars
During the desperate winter of 1940, as the threat of German invasion hung over England, the British government mounted a massive, secret campaign of propaganda to weaken the isolationist sentiment in America and manipulate the country into entering the war on England's behalf. Under the command of the now legendary INTREPID, the British planted propaganda in American newspapers, covertly influenced radio stations and wire services, and plotted against American corporations doing business with the Third Reich. They also pushed President Roosevelt to create a similar covert intelligence agency in the US, and played a role in the selection of William Donovan as its head. Now for the first time, with great research and reporting, Jennet Conant reveals that the beloved author Roald Dahl was a member of Churchill's infamous dirty tricks squad, and tells the full story of how he was recruited to spy on the Americans during World War II. |
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| Forsaken
Of all the great movements of population to and from the United States, the least heralded is the migration, in the depths of the Depression of the nineteen-thirties, of thousands of men, women and children to Stalin s Russia. Where capitalism had failed them, Communism promised dignity for the working man, racial equality, and honest labour. What in fact awaited them, however, was the most monstrous betrayal.In a remarkable piece of historical investigation that spans seven decades of political change, Tim Tzouliadis follows these thousands from Pittsburgh and Detroit and Los Angeles, as their numbers dwindle on their epic and terrible journey.Through official records, memoirs, newspaper reports and interviews he searches the most closely guarded archive in modern history to reconstruct their story - one of honesty, vitality and idealism brought up against the brutal machinery of repression. His account exposes the self-serving American diplomats who refused their countrymen sanctuary, it analyses international relations and economic causes but also finds space to retrieve individual acts of kindness and self-sacrifice. |
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| John Lennon
The final word on music's greatest legend, in which Philip Norman reveals a John Lennon the world has never seen. With ground-breaking insight into the pain, beauty and frustration that shaped the genius of modern music, John Lennon: The Life redefines a legend. John Lennon - the iconic songwriter, composer and one quarter of The Beatles - was a giant of the twentieth century. As the founding member of the world's most successful group ever, he changed lives. Now, the bestselling author of Shout!, recognised for over 25 years as the ultimate Beatles biography, turns his formidable talent to the Beatle for whom belonging to the world's most beloved pop group was never enough. Drawing on previously untapped sources, and with unprecedented access to all the major characters, Philip Norman presents the most complete and revealing portrait of John Lennon ever written. The book's hundreds of key informants and interviewees include Sir Paul McCartney, Sir George Martin, Neil Aspinall, Sean Lennon, whose moving reminiscence reveals his father as never before, and Yoko Ono, who speaks with sometimes shocking candour about the inner workings of her marriage to John.This masterpiece of biography takes a fresh look at every aspect of Lennon's much-chronicled life as Norman shows us the whole man from Lennon's schooldays to his death outside his New York apartment building on December 8, 1980.
Honest and unflinching and featuring previously unseen photographs this truly is the definitive John Lennon. |
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| Gabriel Garcia Marquez
Central concerns will be the rags to riches element of Garcia Marquez's story, the tension in his life between celebrity and literary quality, between politics and writing and between power, solitude and love the contrast between his Caribbean background and the gloomier authoritarianism of highland Bogota and his conscious but nonetheless extraordinary turn away from Macondo, magical realism and One Hundred Years of Solitude after those interlinked phenomena had brought him fame and unimagined wealth. Martin is considered by Garcia Marquez to be his 'official' biographer and he has met the novelist and conducted interviews with him at regular intervals throughout the 15-year research period.He has also interviewed at least 300 other persons, including Fidel Castro, Felipe Gonzalez, several presidents of Colombia, writers like Carlos Fuentes, Mario Vargas Llosa and Alvaro Mutis, the author's wife and sons, his mother, his brothers and sisters, his literary agent and translators, and most of his best friends and professional collaborators (as well as some detractors).
This biography is not only based on Martin's unique experience of Garcia Marquez and his milieux over the last two decades but also on a wealth of sources, which it will be extremely difficult, if not impossible, for any other biographer to replicate. |
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| Happy Families
A choral novel on the hopes, disillusionments and betrayals of family life in Mexico. A rich Catholic rancher wants his four sons to become priests, while the boys themselves have other plans a bereaved mother explains her daughter's life to the man who killed her three daughters meet up around their father's coffin for the first time in ten years a middle-aged couple meet by chance on a cruise-ship and wonder if they were once young lovers. The result is a picture of contemporary Mexico seen through a violently fragmented narrative, not unlike the internationally successful film Amores Perros.The stories are punctuated by a chorus, commenting as if in a Greek tragedy, crudely and unsentimentally on the underbelly of modern Mexican life, offering a raw but richly textured glimpse of the inequalities of that society - street children, junkies, dead rock icons, the ideal wife, a honeymoon gone wrong, a child suicide, a man faking his death and beginning a new life - that throw the middle-class dramas of the linked stories into harsh relief. Every Happy Family is a dramatic polyphony of the many conflicting strands of Latin America and the modern urban world. |
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| The Bedside Baccalaureate
Filled with colour images, extremely readable and with an appealing presentation, The Bedside Baccalaureate provides a fascinating, no-pressure learning experience. Its goal is not the simple accumulation of trivia, but the placement of facts within the framework of knowledge. The 20 courses - focused overviews of subjects with which any well-educated person would want to be familiar - are created by experts in their fields with the intention of making the topics accessible and entertaining. Each course - from Art History to Mathematics and Engineering to Philosophy - consists of 18 one-page lectures that maximise clarity without compromising the integrity of the ideas. The lectures are rotated, rather than clumped together, to add variety to the reading experience and to mimic the heady mix of subjects one encounters in the world of the intellect. The assortment of areas can be dipped into or read in their entirety. Learning is contagious - once started, it's difficult to stop. |
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| Me and Kaminski
Sebastian Zollner, an underachieving art critic, has pinned his hopes of advancement on writing the biography of the artist Manuel Kaminski, a forgotten former pupil of Matisse, now an ailing recluse. Inept, charmless, and with scant knowledge of art history, Zollner is hardly the man to rediscover a lost genius of 20th-century painting. But he has made one crucial discovery about his subject: that Kaminski's long-lost love, Therese, is still living, contrary to what the artist himself has been led to believe. On his arrival at Kaminski's isolated Alpine home, Zollner imposes himself crudely on the household, alienating the artist's protective daughter, Miriam. His efforts to unlock the secrets of Kaminski's life lead him to embark on a series of increasingly desperate measures. Having bribed the housekeeper to absent herself, he ransacks the house in search of revealing documents (he finds little of interest), then dismisses the frail Kaminski's doctor, and spirits the old man away in his daughter's Mercedes for a grand reunion with his old flame. From here on events spiral rapidly out of control.
Zollner's and Kaminski's road-trip, by turns chaotic and grotesque, ends not with an emotional coming together of lost lovers, but in a comically bathetic encounter. Pursued by Kaminski's irate daughter, Zollner and Kaminski take to the road one last time, as the novel draws to its unexpectedly redemptive conclusion. In the paranoid and unlovable Zollner, the enigmatic and sympathetic Kaminski, and their satellite cast of art-world poseurs, eccentrics and oddballs, Kehlmann shows the same gifts for deft characterization and dialogue that he revealed so triumphantly in Measuring the World. Half road novel, half satire on the contemporary art scene, Kaminski and Me is a wryly humorous meditation on art, memory, and identity. It provides further compelling evidence of the exceptional talents of one of Europe's most exciting and gifted young novelists. |
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| No One You Know
Ellie Enderlin spent most of her childhood living in her sister's shadow. Lila was the good daughter - a mathematical genius who could do no wrong in their parents' eyes. Until one day the shape of their family changes forever. Lila is brutally murdered. In the aftermath of her sister's death, Ellie entrusts her most intimate feelings to a man who betrays her utterly by turning the story into a bestselling true crime book - a book that both devastates her family and identifies one of Lila's professors as her killer. Twenty years later and two Americans meet by chance in a remote village in Nicaragua. Ellie is now a professional coffee buyer, an inveterate traveller and incapable of trust. Peter is the academic who saw his career ruined by being named as Lila's killer. He protests his innocence and leaves Ellie with a gift - the notebook that Lila carried everywhere, a piece of evidence not found with her body. Stunned, Ellie will return home to San Francisco to explore the mysteries of Lila's notebook, filled with mathematical equations, and begin a search that has been waiting for her all these years. |
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| The Art of Love
The French Riviera is the setting for this absorbing tale of family intrigue, scandal and romance, against the glamorous background of 1930s artists and aristocracy. Polly Smith is struggling to make a living as an artist when her friend and patron, Oliver, invites her to his father's house in the South of France. Thrilled to escape cold, wet London, Polly asks for her birth certificate to get a passport. Her world changes. Her mother is in fact her aunt her father is unknown even her name isn't right. Fleeing to the Riviera, Polly finds the serenity and sunshine bring her painting to life as never before. But all is not well in the grand house. Oliver's father was forced to leave England in a cloud of scandal and despite the sophisticated, cosmopolitan crowd of friends with which he has surrounded himself, his past is about to catch up with him. Yet even though Polly will find herself at the centre of a web of deception, her own future begins to take on a new and fascinating shape! |
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| The Luminous Life of Lilly Aphrodite
As the clock chimed the turn of the twentieth century, Lilly Nelly Aphrodite took her first breath. Born to a cabaret dancer and soon orphaned in a scandalous murder-suicide, Lilly finds refuge at a Catholic orphanage, coming under the wing of Sister August, the first in a string of lost loves. There she meets Hanne Schmidt, a teen prostitute, and forms a bond that will last them through tumultuous love affairs, disastrous marriages, and destitution during the First World War and the subsequent economic collapse. As the century progresses, Lilly and Hanne move from the tawdry glamour of the tingle-tangle nightclubs to the shadow world of health films before Lilly finds success and stardom in the new medium of motion pictures and ultimately falls in love with a man whose fate could cost her everything she has worked for. Gripping and darkly seductive, THE LUMINOUS LIFE OF LILLY APHRODITE showcases all the glitter and splendor of the brief heyday of the Weimar Republic, and the rise of Hollywood to its golden age. As it foreshadows the horrors of the Second World War, the novel asks what price is paid when identity becomes unfixed and the social order is upended. |
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| The Good Mayor
Set in the little town of Dot in a forgotten part of the Baltic, this is the story of Tibo Krovic, the good and honest Mayor of Dot, and his love for his secretary, the beautiful, lonely but married, Mrs Agathe Stopak. In the quiet, respectable town of Dot, there is nothing that Tibo can do about his love for Mrs Stopak. But one day, when she accidentally drops her lunch into a fountain, everything changes and their lives will never be the same again. The Good Mayor contains love, loss, magic, friendship, wonderful food, a brass band, an Italian witch, a large lawyer, an occasional dog and a car chase that takes place at walking pace. |
| | Liberty
Clint is one of the old reliables in Lake Wobegon - the treasurer of the Lutheran church and the auto mechanic who starts your car on below-zero mornings. For six years he has run the Fourth of July parade, turning what was once a line of pickup trucks and girls pushing baby carriages that hold their cats into an event of dazzling spectacle. Blazing bands, marching units, cannons, horses, a fireworks show, and the famous Living Flag - one thousand men and women wearing red, white, or blue, standing in formation - have attracted the attention of CNN and prompted the governor to put in an appearance as well. The town is dizzy with anticipation.
Until, that is, they hear of Clint's ambition to run for Congress. They're embarrassed for him. They know him too well - his unfortunate episodes involving vodka sours, his rocky marriage. And then there is his friendship, or whatever it is, with the twenty-four-year-old girl who dresses up as the Statue of Liberty for the parade. It's rumoured that underneath those robes she is buck naked, and that her torch contains a quart of booze.
It's Lake Wobegon as it's always been - good loving people who drive each other crazy. |
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| Ian Gawler
The inspiring life story of cancer survivor and renowned healer, Ian Gawler. This honest, unflinching and illuminating portrait of an unorthodox, compassionate and courageous Australian, whose journey has been an inspiration to the lives of so many others, will inspire many more. |
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| Art of Australia: v. 1
In this first volume of a brilliant new history of Australian art, John McDonald, the highly regarded art critic of the Sydney Morning Herald, takes us from the times of pre-history, settlement and exploration, to the end of the colonial era. In the first comprehensive overview of the field since the 1960s, McDonald reassesses the reputations of many leading artists, and links their achievements with the broader patterns of social history and ideas. Along with in-depth discussions of major works, the narrative teems with characters and anecdotes from the era of the First Fleet to that of the Australian Impressionists. The story of Australian art is told in a more vivid and engaging style than ever before, in a lavishly illustrated book destined to take its place as the definitive work on the subject. |
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Best Selling Non Fiction | | | 
| Underbelly
They called Carl Williams 'The Truth' but the truth was he was just a fat kid with a pill press and a taste for fast food, women and bucks. He got lucky the day Jason Moran shot him in the belly instead of the head. Carl didn't return the favour: one by one, Moran, his family, and friends were shot dead during an underworld war for extermination. |
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| Rupert's Adventures in China
Starting his foray into China in the mid-80s, Rupert Murdoch quickly discovered that the rules were different in the Middle Kingdom: unlike in the West, the China's Communist leadership didn't need the support of the media to retain power. Dover paints a personal picture of the man at work, with anecdotes of the impulsive billionaire in his prime. |
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| The Anatomist
Gray's Anatomy still sets the standard in medical textbooks even after 150 years. Little has been written about its author, Henry Gray and less is told about Henry Carter, the illustrator who brought the text to life. This is the true story of the lives of these two men, balancing biography with the author's own experience in anatomy class. |
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| The Whale Warriors
For two months Heller was part of the crew of a vegan pirate ship of eco-crusaders, the Farley Mowat, on a mission to stop Japanese whaling ships in the Antarctic. As they plough through the Antarctic, weathing gale force winds and thirty-five foot seas, they find themselves at the centre of an international whaling war. |
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2007 Pulitzer Prize Winner! | | | 
| The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao
Things have never been easy for Oscar. A ghetto nerd living with his Dominican family in New Jersey, he's sweet but disastrously overweight. He dreams of becoming the next J.R.R. Tolkien and he keeps falling hopelessly in love. Poor Oscar may never get what he wants, thanks to the Fuk --the ancient curse that has haunted his family for generations, dooming them to prison, torture, violent accidents, and, above all, ill-starred love.With dazzling energy and insight Diaz immerses us in the tumultuous lives of Oscar; his runaway sister Lola; their beautiful mother Belicia; and in the family's uproarious journey from the Dominican Republic to the US and back.Rendered with uncommon warmth and humour, The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Waopresents an astonishing vision of the endless human capacity to persevere - and to risk it all - in the name of love. A literary triumph, this novel confirms Junot Diaz as one of the funniest, warmest and most exciting writers of our time. |
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