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October07 Fiction Catalogue You are welcome anytime to come
to the shop and browse the books or contact us for more information on
02 6274 4459 or
books@smithsbooks.com.au |
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"Rashomon" and Seventeen Other Stories Akutagawa, Ryunosuke Paperback , 212 x 144mm. Penguin UK UK 2007 Ryunosuke Akutagawa (1892-1927) is one of Japan's foremost stylists - a modernist master whose short stories are marked by highly original imagery, cynicism, beauty and wild humour. This work features stories such as "Rashomon", "In a Bamboo Grove", "The Nose", "O-Gin", "Loyalty", "Death Register", "The Life of a Stupid Man" and "Spinning Gears". [When referring to this item please quote stockid :152006]AUD26.95
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Alentejo Blue Ali Monica Tatler 'Compelling, atmospheric and elegantly written.' --This text refers to the Hardcover edition. Daily Telegraph 'Well written and often entertaining .... a perfectly pleasant read.' --This text refers to the Hardcover edition. Marie Claire 'If you're looking for an intelligent holiday read, this has it all.' --This text refers to the Hardcover edition. Book Description An evocative tale of belonging and exile by one of Britain's best young novelists. |
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Alibi Kanon, Joseph "Burrowing deeply into
Patricia Highsmith territory, Kanon has crafted an absorbing tale. . . .
[Kanon] is frequently compared to the likes of John le Carré and Graham
Greene. With Alibi, he shows that he's up to the comparison."--San
Francisco Chronicle
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All Aunt Hagar's Children Jones, Edward P In
fourteen sweeping and sublime stories, five of which have been published
in The New Yorker, the bestselling and Pulitzer Prize-winning author of
The Known World shows that his grasp of the human condition is firmer
than ever Returning to the city that inspired his first prizewinning book, Lost in the City, Jones has filled this new collection with people who call Washington, D.C., home. Yet it is not the city's power brokers that most concern him but rather its ordinary citizens. All Aunt Hagar's Children turns an unflinching eye to the men, women, and children caught between the old ways of the South and the temptations that await them further north, people who in Jones's masterful hands, emerge as fully human and morally complex, whether they are country folk used to getting up with the chickens or people with centuries of education behind them. |
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Arlington Park Cusk Rachel Jane Shilling,
Evening Standard Juliet is enraged at the victory of men over women in family life. Amanda is warding off thoughts of death with obsessive housework. Solly is confronting her own buried femininity in the person of her Italian lodger. Maisie despairs at the inevitability with which beauty is destroyed. And Christine's troubled, hilarious spirit presides over Arlington Park and the way of life it represents. Rachel Cusk's sixth novel is her best yet. Full of compassion and wit, she writes about the domestic lives, private thoughts and fears of a group of remarkable and instantly recognisable women. |
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BALLAD OF DESMOND KALE, THE MCDONALD ROGER, THE
BALLAD OF DESMOND KALE by Roger McDonald Winner of the 2006 Miles Franklin Award. THE BALLAD OF DESMOND KALE is a broad-sweeping novel of the first days of British settlement in Australia. At the centre is Stanton's pursuit of Kale - an Irish political prisoner and a rebelliously brilliant breeder of sheep. The alchemy of wool fascinates, threatens, and transforms when it is discovered that fine wool thrives in New South Wales as nowhere else in in the world, producing veritable gold on sheep's backs. |
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BLIND WILLOW, SLEEPING WOMAN MURAKAMI HARUKI,
Blind Willow, Sleeping Woman is Murakami’s third collection of stories
to be published in English, and it will undoubtedly confirm his
reputation as literature’s answer to David Lynch Jonathan Ellis TLS A young man accompanies his cousin to the hospital to check an unusual hearing complaint and recalls a story of a woman put to sleep by tiny flies crawling inside her ear; a mirror appears out of nowhere and a nightwatchman is unnerved as his reflection tries to take control of him; a couple’s relationship is unbalanced after dining exclusively on exquisite crab while on holiday; a man follows instructions on the back of a postcard to apply for a job, but an unknown password stands between him and his mysterious employer. In each one of these stories Murakami sidesteps the real and sprints for the surreal. Everyday events are transcended, leaving the reader dazzled by this master of his craft. |
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Certainty Thien Madeleine Gail Lim, a producer of radio documentaries in present-day Vancouver, finds herself haunted by events in her parents' past in war-torn Malaysia, a past which remains a mystery that fiercely grips her imagination. Gail's father, Matthew, grew up under the terrifying shadow of war in Japanese-occupied Sanddakan where he witnessed his father being shot by the soldiers with whom he had collaborated. |
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Christopher's Ghosts McCarry Charles
Christopher’s Ghosts is the new novel from the unrivalled master of
intelligent American spy fiction. In an epic whose cinematic scope
brings to life the tension and fear of Europe in the late 1930s, Charles
McCarry takes the reader back in time, to the youth of CIA agent Paul
Christopher in pre-war Berlin, to lay the foundations of one of the most
remarkable characters in espionage fiction. |
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Dharma Bums The Kerouac Jack A classic!
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Divisadero Ondaatje Michael From Publishers
Weekly Ondaatje's oddly structured but emotionally riveting fifth novel opens in the Northern California of the 1970s. Anna, who is 16 and whose mother died in childbirth, has formed a serene makeshift family with her same-age adopted sister, Claire, and a taciturn farmhand, Coop, 20. But when the girls' father, otherwise a ghostly presence, finds Anna having sex with Coop and beats him brutally, Coop leaves the farm, drawing on a cardsharp's skills to make an itinerant living as a poker player. A chance meeting years later reunites him with Claire. Runaway teen Anna, scarred by her father's savage reaction, resurfaces as an adult in a rural French village, researching the life of a Gallic author, Jean Segura, who lived and died in the house where she has settled. |
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Doghead Ramsland Morte Naughty Boys.Dirty
Secrets.Mad Dogs. In the Eriksson family, childhood is a shocking experience, full of crude and disturbing rites of passage. It all started with Askild ‘the Crackpot’, chased by bloodhounds on a German plain after escaping from a Nazi concentration camp: he is a painter, a murderer and a thief. |
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Easter At Tobruk O'Sullivan, Michael Highly
Commended: IP Picks 2006, Best Fiction In Easter at Tobruk Christianity and war collide in an Australian context. With engaging candor the novel explores changing values in our society since the Second World War. The narrative focuses on two Easters, that of 1941 when Australian troops entered Tobruk in North Africa, and another fifty years later. The main character, Rob, finds himself caught in an improbable time-warp, breathing colour into events and characters too often rendered with historical dispassion. Australia 2007 Reviews |
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Engleby Faulks Sebastian Mike Engleby says things that others dare not even think. When the novel opens in the 1970s, he is a university student, having survived a 'traditional' school. A man devoid of scruple or self-pity, Engleby provides a disarmingly frank account of English education. Yet beneath the disturbing surface of his observations lies an unfolding mystery of gripping power. One of his contemporaries unaccountably disappears, and as we follow Engleby's career, which brings us up to the present day, the reader has to ask: is "Engleby" capable of telling the whole truth? "Engleby" can be read as a lament for a generation and the country it failed. It is also a poignant account of the frailty of human consciousness. Sebastian Faulks' new novel is a bolt from the blue, unlike anything he has written before: contemporary, demotic, heart-wrenching - and funny, in the deepest shade of black. Random Hou 2007 [When referring to this item please quote stockid :148021]AUD32.95 |
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Everyman Roth Philip Carl Wilkinson, Observer
'capable of altering the way you see the world' Andrew Holgate, The Sunday Times Pick of the week - 'one ends the novel exhilarated, buoyed up by its boldness and defiance' |
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Fallen Maine David From Booklist What Maine did for the story of Noah and the flood in The Preservationist (2004) he does again with the story of Cain and Abel in Fallen. The first recorded murder takes barely 26 lines in Genesis. What Maine does with those few facts is masterfully creative. The story is told in reverse, beginning with Cain as an old man waiting to die and mourning the fact that the ghost of his murdered brother has left him. It deftly moves backward to the murder and God's punishment, where the point of view shifts to Abel just a few days before the murder. |
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