SMSA (Sydney Mechanics’ School of Arts)
New Book Highlights
ANIMAL STORIES
| Crampton, Suzanna | Bodacious the shepherd cat |
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BIOGRAPHY
| Bingham, Charlotte | MI5 and me |
| Bourdain, Anthony | Kitchen confidential |
| Lee, Bri | Eggshell skull |
| Lloyd, Virginia | Girls at the piano |
| Moghul, Haroon | How to be a Muslim |
| Rees, Peter | The missing man |
| Riminton, Hugh | Minefields |
| Smith, Gregory Peel | Out of the forest |
| Tucker, Michelle Scott | Elizabeth Macarthur |
Eggshell skull / Bri Lee
Blending memoir with social commentary, Bri Lee’s Eggshell Skull is a book about trauma, culpability and retribution. Unlike recently published personal narratives that are used as a launchpad to explore broader societal questions—Australia’s relationship with alcohol in Elspeth Muir’s Wasted and the shifting signposts of adulthood in Briohny Doyle’s Adult Fantasy—Eggshell Skull is a meditation on rape culture and the fallibility of the legal system that dovetails into Lee’s personal experience of being a victim of child sex abuse. In her recollections from her time as a judge’s associate in Queensland, innocuous everyday items such as Hills Hoists, trampolines and model aeroplanes assume sinister meanings synonymous with the pervasiveness of the abuse girls and women suffer. Case after case of acquitted offenders accused of heinous acts unfold alongside Lee’s waxing and waning resolve to bring her perpetrator to court as she witnesses how women are continually let down by the legal system. Blow-by-blow details of the confronting cases coupled with the writer’s trauma make for a relentless read, but the book is at its strongest when its charting the minutiae of how women are gaslit by men and the system alike. (Books and Publishing, 3 April 2018)
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CRAFT
| Marchen Art Studio | Macrame pattern book |
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GENERAL FICTION
| Ãrbol, Victor del | A million drops |
| Backman, Fredrik | Us against you |
| Byrski, Liz | A month of Sundays |
| Carey, Peter | Bliss |
| Cebeni, Valentina | The little Italian bakery |
| Clinton, Bill | The president is missing |
| Cumming, Charles | The man between |
| Dickinson, Jan Wallace | The sweet hills of Florence |
| Goldin, Megan | The escape room |
| Harvey, Samantha | The western wind |
| Henderson, J. | Larry and the dog people |
| Hills, Lia | The crying place |
| Horowitz, Anthony | Forever and a day |
| Johnstone, Doug | Fault lines |
| Kunzru, Hari | White tears |
| Levene, Louise | Happy little bluebirds |
| Merritt, Stephanie | While you sleep |
| Moriarty, Nicola | The fifth letter |
| Preston, Douglas J. | The pharaoh key |
| Regan, Katy | Little big love |
| Richell, Hannah | The peacock summer |
| Rowley, Emma | Where the missing go |
| Seghers, Anna | The seventh cross |
| Sussman, Fiona | The last time we spoke |
| Swan, Karen | The Greek escape |
| Tamirat, Nafkote | The parking lot attendant |
| Thompson, Carlene | Just a breath away |
| Thomson, Rupert | Never anyone but you |
| Trevor, William | Last stories |
| White, Christian | The nowhere child |
| Winthrop, Elizabeth | The mercy seat |
White tears / Hari Kunzru
Twenty-something white roommates Carter and Seth are audiophiles, record collectors, and budding producers living in New York. They’re obsessed with black music, whether it’s reggae, jazz, funk, or hip-hop. When Seth records an old chess player in the park, Carter remixes it into a counterfeit blues song and markets the record as the work of an obscure black singer named Charlie Shaw. Almost immediately, they are approached by a mysterious collector who insists that Shaw is real—and after Carter is savagely beaten and left in a coma, Seth begins to discover just how real. With Carter’s sister, Leonie, for whom Seth nurses an unrequited crush, Seth undertakes a perilous journey from New York to Mississippi to unravel a mystery that weaves together the blues, obsessive collectors, and the American South. What he finds is murder and the unquiet ghost of Shaw. White Tears is a fast-paced, hallucinatory book written in extraordinary prose, but it’s also perhaps the ultimate literary treatment of the so-called hipster, tracing the roots of the urban bedroom deejay to the mythic blues troubadours of the antebellum South. In his most accessible book to date, Kunzru takes on the vinyl-digging gentrification culture with a historical conscience. (Publishers Weekly, 14 March 2017)
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HISTORICAL FICTION
| Fremantle, Elizabeth | The poison bed |
| Lloyd, Robin | Harbor of spies |
| Tait, Vanessa | The pharmacist’s wife |
The pharmacist’s wife / Vanessa Tait
The Pharmacist’s Wife is a tale of deception, addiction and revenge. Rebecca is a young wife in Victorian Edinburgh, struggling hard to behave exactly as she should. Her husband has just opened a new pharmacy and laboratory and has created a new drug which he hopes will gain him acclaim. Alexander offers her the new drug, which he has named heroin, to calm her nervous energy and headaches, and Rebecca discovers that it enables her to escape from her dull everyday. However, she becomes concerned at Alexander’s strange sexual behaviour and begins to believe that he has been unfaithful. She makes friends with Evangeline, the woman she believes to be his mistress, discovering that she too is an addict. When Rebecca discovers the depths of her husband’s depravity and that she and Evangeline have both been dupes in his experiment, she begins to plot her revenge. This is a fast-paced tale of Victorian attitudes to women and sex. It examines the place of women in society from the housemaid to the prostitute to the angel in the house. Rebecca is a sharply observed character who journeys from blushing bride to quivering addict to strong-willed and independent woman. This is a dark tale of love and revenge, which will appeal to fans of Sarah Perry, Sarah Waters and Jessie Burton. (Historical Novels Reviews, Issue 84, May 2018)
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MYSTERY
| Billingham, Mark | The killing habit |
| Carol, James | Prey |
| Clifford, Aoife | Second sight |
| Craven, M. W. | The puppet show |
| Ellis, Kate | A cursed inheritance |
| Fitzgerald, Conor | Bitter remedy |
| French, Nicci | Day of the dead |
| Froest, Frank | The rogues’ syndicate |
| Gray, Alex | Only the dead can tell |
| Grey, Isabelle | The special girls |
| Herron, Mick | The list |
| Herron, Mick | This is what happened |
| Kava, Alex | Lost creed |
| Kavanagh, Dan | Duffy |
| Kepler, Lars, | The rabbit hunter |
| Koreto, R. J. | The body in the ballroom |
| Koryta, Michael | How it happened |
| MacDonald, Patricia | Girl in the woods |
| McCall Smith, Alexander | The quiet side of passion |
| Ohlsson, Kristina | The lies we tell |
| Riggs, Cynthia | Widow’s wreath |
| Robotham, Michael | The other wife |
| Sigurdardottir, Yrsa | The reckoning |
| Thorne, David | Perfect match |
| Tope, Rebecca | Peril in the Cotswolds |
| Townsend, Peggy | See her run |
| Walker, Martin | A taste for vengeance |
| Williams, Sue I. | Live and let fry |
| Wilson, Andrew | A different kind of evil |
| Zhou, Haohui | Death notice |
See her run / Peggy Townsend
When disgraced reporter Aloa Snow starts to dig into the death of Hayley Poole, she’s in it for the paycheck and not the mystery. The $15,000 promised her for fleshing out the story would go a long way to covering her debts, and her name’s been worthless in the reporting world ever since she fudged some facts rushing out a story while dealing with her mother’s death. If Aloa had another option to earn the cash, she’d take it, because she doesn’t want Michael Collins, the guy behind the dollars, to think he has any right to her time or attention. Now Michael’s grown rich as a software developer, and his interest in this case simultaneously intrigues and angers Aloa, who’s developing her own relationship to the history surrounding Hayley. The dead woman was a professional adventure runner along with her boyfriend, Ethan, who was killed under mysterious circumstance six months before Hayley died. Aloa uncovers connections between Hayley’s life, a dietary supplement gone wrong, international terrorism, and other possible motives for murder, but given the drugs found in Hayley’s system, the cops are likely to write this off as an addict come to a bad end unless Aloa can unravel the truth. Townsend’s debut is driven by brisk plotting with bursts of stylish prose. Her eye for sharp character details makes her one to watch. (Kirkus Reviews, 1 April 2018)
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NON FICTION
| Brooks, Michael | The Quantum astrologer’s handbook | 530.12 BROO | |
| Cooke, Lucy | The unexpected truth about animals | 590.2 COOK | |
| Fagan, Brian M | A little history of archaeology | 930.1 FAGA | |
| Harari, Yuval N. | Homo deus | 909.83 HARA | |
| Heiss, Anita | Growing up Aboriginal in Australia | 305.899 HEIS | |
| Mackay, Hugh | Australia reimagined | 306 MACK | |
| Patterson, Christina | The art of not falling apart | 070.92 PATT | |
| Revkin, Andrew | Weather | 551.6 REVK | |
| Scales, Helen | Eye of the shoal | 597 SCAL | |
| Stuart, Alexx | Low tox life | 613 STUA | |
| Tucker, Holly | City of light, city of poison | 363.209 TUCK | |
| Wohlleben, Peter | The weather detective | 551.6 WOHL | |
City of light, city of poison / Holly Tucker
Tucker vividly brings to life a slice of Parisian history in this rigorously researched true-crime epic, set during the reign of Louis XIV. The book opens in 1665 with the murder of the city’s criminal lieutenant, the public official with jurisdiction over most crimes committed in the city, who was stabbed to death by some inept burglars, followed by the poisoning of one of his colleagues, who resolved civil disputes, a year later. The embarrassment about these deaths led to the appointment of the first police chief of Paris, Nicolas de La Reynie, who began with reforms to literally clean up the filthy streets of the city and to deter nighttime crime with a massive campaign to install thousands of lanterns on most Paris streets. Eventually, he investigated the Affair of the Poisons, a series of crimes involving members of France’s high nobility and reaching into the palace. The investigation led to the creation of a secret tribunal that imprisoned hundreds and executed more than 30 people. Although many documents were burned by the king himself after La Reynie’s death, Tucker draws on other contemporary records to meticulously reconstruct this fascinating chapter in the annals of true crime. The result reads like a combination of the most compelling mystery fiction
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ROMANCE
| Lorret, Vivienne | How to forget a Duke |
| MacKenzie, Sally | How to manage a Marquess |
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SCIENCE FICTION & FANTASY
| King, Stephen | The outsider |
| Kuang, R. F. | The poppy war |
| Mieville, China | The city & the city |
| Taylor, Jodi | A second chance |
The city and the city / China Mieville
Fantasy veteran Miéville adds a murder mystery to the mix in his tale of two fiercely independent East European cities coexisting in the same physical location, the denizens of one willfully imperceptible to the other. Citizens of Beszel are trained from birth to ignore, or “unsee,” the city and inhabitants of Ul Qoma (and vice versa), even when trains from both cities run along the same set of tracks, and houses of different cities stand alongside one another. To step from one city to the other is a criminal act that immediately invokes Breach, the terrifying, implacable, ever-watching forces that patrol the shadowy borders. Summoned to a patch of waste ground where a murdered female has been dumped from a van, Beszel’s Detective Inspector Tyador Borlú learns the victim was a resident of Ul Qoma. Clearly, the Oversight Committee must invoke Breach, thus relieving Borlú of all further responsibility. Except that a videotape shows the van arriving legally in Beszel from Ul Qoma via the official border crossing point. Therefore, no breach, so Borlú must venture personally into Ul Qoma to pursue an investigation that grows steadily more difficult and alarming. Grimy, gritty reality occasionally spills over into unintelligible hypercomplexity, but this spectacularly, intricately paranoid yarn is worth the effort. (Kirkus Reviews, 1 May 2009)
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TRAVEL
| Orth, Stephan | Couchsurfing in Iran | 915.5 ORTH |
| Rosenbloom, Stephanie | Alone time | 910.401 ROSE |
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New additions to eBooks at SMSA
EBOOKS
| General | Anderson-Dargatz, Gail | From scratch |
| General | Meyerson, Amy | The bookshop of yesterdays |
| General | Vila-Sanjuán, Sergio | A Barcelona heiress |
| Historical novels | Jones, Ellen | Fatal crown |
| Mystery | Black, Lisa | Trail of blood |
| Mystery | Damsgaard, Shirley | Witch way to murder |
| Non fiction | Wild, Kate | Waiting for Elijah |
| Science fiction | Taylor, Jodi | And the rest is history |
| Science fiction | Taylor, Jodi | Lies, damned lies and history |
The bookshop of yesterdays / Amy Meyerson
In her heartfelt debut, Meyerson brings readers on a scavenger hunt full of literary clues and family secrets. Miranda Brooks feels her life is finally coming together—she adores teaching high school history in Philadelphia and has decided to settle there, taking the big step of moving in with her boyfriend, a fellow teacher. But Miranda’s cozy life is thrown into tumult when she receives a mysterious package after the sudden death of her estranged uncle Billy, who she hasn’t spoken to since a falling-out between him and her mother years before. Once a huge part of her life, Billy used to invite Miranda to his Los Angeles bookshop, Prospero Books, where they would read and solve riddles he thought up. But, on Miranda’s 12th birthday, her mother and Billy had a mysterious fight, and Miranda hasn’t heard from him since. After his death, Miranda travels to L.A., where she learns that Billy has left her Prospero Books—along with a literary clue to one final adventure he wanted to share with her. She works with the devoted staff to revive the old store, all the while following Billy’s clues, which lead her to hidden family secrets. Filled with quotes from and allusions to The Tempest, The Wizard of Oz, and Jane Eyre, Meyerson’s evocative novel is a fun homage to book lovers and the eclectic spirit of L.A. (Publishers Weekly, 26 March 2018)
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AUDIOBOOKS
| General | Belle, Kimberley | The marriage lie |
| General | Hoang, Helen | The kiss quotient |
| General | Jewell, Lisa | Then she was gone |
| General | Whittal, Zoe | The middle ground |
| Mystery | Cain, Chelsea | One kick |
| Mystery | Ellis, Joy | Killer on the Fens |
| Mystery | Ellis, Joy | Stalker on the Fens |
| Mystery | Gruber, Michael | Tropic of the night |
| Mystery | Knecht, Rosie | Who is Vera Kelly |
| Non fiction | Flanders, Cait | The year of less |
| Romance | Quin, Julia | The girl with the make believe husband |
Then she was gone / Lisa Jewell
The disappearance of beautiful, brainy 15-year-old Ellie Mack in May 2005 from her north London neighborhood takes a terrible toll on her parents and siblings, even a decade later. Most profoundly affected is her now-divorced mother, Laurel. After a shocking development in the cold case jolts Laurel from her lonely limbo, Laurel stuns herself by agreeing to dinner with a man she meets in a café, genial author Floyd Dunn, and quickly falls into a relationship with him and the younger of his daughters, precocious nine-year-old Poppy—who reminds Laurel eerily in so many ways of Ellie. But then unsettling coincidences start to emerge, most notably Laurel’s discovery that Floyd’s former partner, Noelle Donnelly, who he claims vanished five years earlier after dumping Poppy with him, was Ellie’s math tutor. Skillfully told by several narrators (some of them ghostly), Jewell’s gripping novel transcends its plot improbabilities to connect with an emotionally resonant story of loss, grief, and renewal. (Publishers Weekly, 29 January 2018)
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New Books — July 2018
3The new books for July 2018 are now available to borrow, with new ebooks and audiobooks.
We hope you enjoy them!
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