SMSA (Sydney Mechanics’ School of Arts)
New Book Highlights
BIOGRAPHY
| Brown, Phil | The Kowloon kid |
| MacCallum, Mungo | The good, the bad and the unlikely |
| Moody, Mary | The accidental tour guide |
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CLASSICS
| Grossman, Vasili | Life and fate |
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COOKING
| Oliver, Jamie | Super food family classics |
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GENERAL FICTION
| Archer, Jeffrey | Nothing ventured |
| Aw, Tash | We, the survivors |
| Burton, Jessie | The confession |
| Delaney, JP | The perfect wife |
| Doughty, Louise | Platform Seven |
| Frances, Michelle | The daughter |
| Kawaguchi, Toshikazu | Before the coffee gets cold |
| Keane, Mary Beth | Ask again, yes |
| Levy, Andrea | Small Island |
| McCall Smith, Alexander | The peppermint tea chronicles |
| McGahan, Andrew | The rich man’s house |
| Moggach, Deborah | The carer |
| Nell, Joanne | The last voyage of Mrs Henry Parker |
| Niehaus, Amanda | The breeding season |
| Nunez, Sigrid | The last of her kind |
| Poschmann, Marion | The pine islands |
| Prescott, Lara | The secrets we kept |
| Shamsie, Kamila | Burnt shadows |
| Stead, Elizabeth | The aunts’ house |
| Tawada, Yoko | The emissary |
| Webber, Heather S. | Midnight at the Blackbird Cafe |
| Woodson, Jacqueline | Red at the bone |
| Youngson, Anne | Meet me at the museum |
The breeding season / Amanda Niehaus
Elise and Dan should have been celebrating the most wonderful event in their lives. Instead, their son, William, is stillborn. Isolated in their grief, they turn away from each other. Scientist Elise believes she can heal her pain through gruelling fieldwork in remote locations where she doesn’t have to see or speak to people but can distract herself by focusing on marsupials. Writer Dan looks to art for answers. He is working on a memoir of his uncle, famous artist Berlin Warne, yet finds himself trapped in memories of his mother, a health guru who committed suicide after he wrote an unflattering book about her life. As Dan navigates through his grief, he questions the truths of his life. Their dead child has created a gap between he and Elise that can never be filled but can they forgive themselves and find a way back to each other before it’s too late? This debut novel by scientist and writer Amanda Niehaus explores the intersection of art and science, marrying poetic, visceral writing with scientific exploration of issues, particularly sex, reproduction, death and interaction between men and women. The story examines the personal – a couple’s struggle to cope with devastating loss – amid wider issues such as the male gaze in art and science. The sentences zing off the page, plunging the reader into an emotional and intellectual world where they may question ideas they’ve taken for granted. Niehaus’s strong prose matches the power of the ideas she raises, where life and love is explored in its full complexity. (Good Reading Magazine, September 2019)
Jacqueline Woodson / Red at the bone
Woodson’s beautifully imagined novel explores the ways an unplanned pregnancy changes two families. The narrative opens in the spring of 2001, at the coming-of-age party that 16-year-old Melody’s grandparents host for her at their Brooklyn brownstone. A family ritual adapted from cotillion tradition, the event ushers Melody into adulthood as an orchestra plays Prince and her “court” dances around her. Amid the festivity, Melody and her family—her unmarried parents, Iris and Aubrey, and her maternal grandparents, Sabe and Sammy “Po’Boy” Simmons, think of both past and future, delving into extended flashbacks that comprise most of the text. Sabe is proud of the education and affluence she has achieved, but she remains haunted by stories of her family’s losses in the fires of the 1921 Tulsa race massacre. The discovery that her daughter, Iris, was pregnant at 15 filled her with shame, rage, and panic. After the birth of Melody, Iris, uninterested in marrying mail-room clerk Aubrey, pined for the freedom that her pregnancy curtailed. Leaving Melody to be raised by Aubrey, Sabe, and Po’Boy, she departed for Oberlin College in the early ’90s and, later, to a Manhattan apartment that her daughter is invited to visit but not to see as home. Their relationship is strained as Melody dons the coming-out dress her mother would have worn if she hadn’t been pregnant with Melody. Woodson’s nuanced voice evokes the complexities of race, class, religion, and sexuality in fluid prose and a series of telling details. This is a wise, powerful, and compassionate novel. (Publishers Weekly, 25 May 2019)
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GRAPHIC NOVELS
| Bechdel, Alison | Fun home |
Fun home / Alison Bechdel
Bechdel’s memoir offers a graphic narrative of uncommon richness, depth, literary resonance and psychological complexity. Though Bechdel takes her formal cues from comic books, she receives more inspiration from the likes of Proust and Joyce as she attempts to unravel the knots of her family’s twisted emotional history. At the core of this compelling narrative is her relationship with her father, a literary-minded high-school teacher who restores and runs the familial funeral parlor. Beneath his icy reserve and fussy perfectionism, he is a barely closeted homosexual and a suspected pedophile, an imposing but distant presence to his young daughter, who finds that their main bond is a shared literary sensibility. As she comes of age as an artist and comes to terms with her own sexual identity, Bechdel must also deal with the dissolution of her parents’ marriage and, soon afterward, her father’s death. Was it an accident or was it suicide? How did her father’s sexuality shape her own? Rather than proceeding in chronological fashion, the memoir keeps circling back to this central relationship and familial tragedy, an obsession that the artist can never quite resolve or shake. The results are painfully honest, occasionally funny and penetratingly insightful. Feminists, lesbians and fans of underground comics will enthusiastically embrace this major advance in Bechdel’s work. Though a graphic novel, it shares as much in spirit with the work of Mary Karr, Tobias Wolff and other contemporary memoirists of considerable literary accomplishment. (Kirkus Reviews, 20 May 2010)
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HISTORICAL FICTION
| Hertmans, Stefan | The convert |
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MYSTERY
| Ahnhem, Stefan | Motive X |
| Askew, Claire | What you pay for |
| Barr, Nevada | What Rose forgot |
| Bell, Gary | Beyond reasonable doubt |
| Booth, Stephen | Drowned lives |
| Camilleri, Andrea | The other end of the line |
| Cleeves, Ann | The long call |
| Coleman, Reed Farrel | Robert B. Parker’s The bitterest pill |
| Davies, Michelle | False witness |
| Di Marco, Connie | The madness of Mercury |
| Dyer, Ashley | Splinter in the blood |
| Faye, Lyndsay | The fatal flame |
| Frear, Caz | Stone cold heart |
| Hart, Ellen | Twisted at the root |
| James, Peter | The secret of Cold Hill |
| Jennings, Maureen | Heat wave |
| Keller, Julia | The cold way home |
| Kidman, Fiona | This mortal boy |
| La Plante, Lynda | The dirty dozen |
| Lindsay, Douglas | The art of dying |
| Lippman, Laura | Lady in the lake |
| Locke, Attica | Heaven, my home |
| Mallinson, J.D. | The chinese zodiac mystery |
| McCall Smith, Alexander | To the land of long lost friends |
| McDermid, Val | How the dead speak |
| Miscellaneous | Invisible blood |
| Neggers, Carla | Rival’s break |
| Perry, Anne | Death in focus |
| Preston, Douglas J. | Old bones |
| Robb, J. D. | Vendetta in death |
| Robinson, Peter | Many rivers to cross |
| Stevenson, Benjamin | Trust me when I lie |
| Stewart, Amy | Kopp sisters on the march |
| Sykes, S. D. | The bone fire |
| Symon, Vanda | Overkill |
| Thomson, E. S. | Surgeons’ hall |
| Tracy, P. J. | Ice cold heart |
| Weaver, Tim | No one home |
| Wilson, Andrew | Death in a desert land |
| Yu, Ovidia | The paper bark tree mystery |
Splinter in the blood / Ashley Dyer
Five women. Five bodies full of increasingly elaborate tattoo art made with a thorn instead of a needle. Liverpool DCI Carver has been leading the Thorn Killer investigation team, until he’s found shot by his partner, the inscrutable DS Ruth Lake. It seems extremely suspicious that a police officer would come upon a crime scene, take the murder weapon and her partner’s secret notes on the case, and wipe the scene down for prints, all before calling for help. But it appears that Lake has a motive for everything, squeaky clean or not. With Carver laid up in the hospital and Lake told to stay away from the investigation into his shooting, being a semi witness and all, she dives back into the Thorn Killer inquiry, focusing on the last victim, theatre student Kara Grogan, a young woman who bore a striking resemblance to Carver’s estranged wife. As Lake dips her toe into the often vicious world of amateur theatre, Carver fights his own battles at the hospital, trying to remember the events that put him there and whether the Thorn Killer is responsible. Interludes from the killer, while commonplace in crime fiction, are an unneeded crutch here but don’t slow the momentum. With complicated leads and a ruthless killer whose method is barbaric enough to be frightening without shading into the grotesque, this is a debut worthy of sequels. (Kirkus Reviews, 17 April 2018)
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NON FICTION
| Battams, Samantha | The secret art of poisoning | 364.152 BATT |
| Brett, Doris | The Sunday Story Club | 158.35 BRET |
| Cooney, Kara | When women ruled the world | 932 COON |
| Cousens, Graham | 50 secrets of Surry Hills & Redfern | 994.41 COUS |
| Cusk, Rachel | Coventry | 814 CUSK |
| Dalrymple, William | The anarchy | 954.031 DALR |
| Davis, Stephen | Truthteller | 070.43 DAVI |
| Fox, Peter | Walking towards thunder | 363.209 FOX |
| Lake, Meredith | The Bible in Australia | 220 LAKE |
| Lewis, Peter | Webtopia | 303.4833 LEWI |
| Tolentino, Jia | Trick mirror | 973.93 TOLE |
Trick mirror / Jia Tolentino
In these nine stunning pieces, New Yorker staff writer Tolentino seamlessly melds together journalistic social criticism and revealing personal essays. To varying degrees of intimate context, she places herself within each narrative, reporting on broad social currents while revealing very specific encounters. Among the many topics the author explores: the expansive influence of the internet and social media; the increasing social pressure to optimize our interests and aspirations at all times (especially for women); the alarming proliferation and increased tolerance of scamming; societal, somewhat idealized traditions such as marriage and, more specifically, weddings. Tolentino recounts her experience with reality TV and reflects on her teenage identity when she appeared as a contestant in Girls v. Boys: Puerto Rico. She also recalls favourite literary books from her past, assessing the heroines’ varying plights in guiding her current feminist leanings. While offering razor-sharp commentary on the underbelly of our culture, she can also appreciate its attraction. Furthermore, she acknowledges her particular conundrum, having established her niche as a writer by staying in tune with cultural trends. Tolentino offers a millennial perspective that is deeply grounded, intellectually transcending her relative youth. She brings fresh perspective to current movements in a manner similar to that of Joan Didion in the 1960s and ’70s. Exhilarating, groundbreaking essays that should establish Tolentino as a key voice of her generation. (Kirkus Reviews, 12 May 2019)
When women ruled the world: six queens of Egypt / Kara Cooney
Cooney, an Egyptologist at UCLA, profiles six women who rose to power in ancient Egypt. The women most closely connected to the king played a central role and could, when circumstances demanded, become kings themselves. Some of the names (Nefertiti, Cleopatra) are familiar, but this book breaks from trends in studies of ancient Egypt by not focusing exclusively on death rites and funerary architecture. Cooney discusses the women’s leadership and speculates about what they must have experienced, including the habits and perspectives of the elite. Attempting to draw parallels between the pharaohs and contemporary rock stars and politicians, Cooney occasionally asks too much of her narrative. But her stories of these remarkable women, who in flashes displayed “true, successful female power that tapped into the emotions of [their] people, that embraced multiple perspectives, that reached out in a spirit of reconciliation to those who had been expelled or cast out,” will enchant those wishing to imagine what ancient Egyptian court life was like. (Publishers Weekly, 12 November 2018)
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POETRY
| Upton, John | Sheet music |
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ROMANCE
Romance
| Michaels, Kasey, | Regency attraction |
| Mortimer, Carole | A lady in disguise |
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SCIENCE FICTION & FANTASY
| Atwood, Margaret | The testaments |
| Fields, D. K. | Widow’s welcome |
| Gwynne, John | Wrath |
| Iggulden, Conn | The sword saint |
| King, Stephen | The institute |
| Taylor, Jodi | Long story short |
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TRAVEL
| Langton, Marcia | Welcome to country | 919.404 LANG |
| Lonely Planet Guide | Best of London 2020 | 914.21048612 LONE |
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New additions to eBooks at SMSA
EBOOKS
| Biography | Payne, Michelle | Life as I know it |
| General novels | Burton, Jessie | The confession |
| General novels | Haratischvili, Nino | The eighth life |
| General novels | Price, Steven | Lampedusa |
| Historical novels | Cornwell, Bernard | Sword of kings |
| Mystery | Hammer, Chris | Silver |
| Mystery | Jeffreys, Robert | Man at the window |
| Mystery | Lynch, Rachel | Dark game |
| Mystery | Penrose, Andrea | Murder at Kensington Palace |
| Science fiction and fantasy | Hewitt, Deborah | The nightjar
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The nightjar / Deborah Hewitt
In Hewitt’s superb, darkly charming debut, Londoner Alice Wyndham receives a mysterious gift and discovers that she is an exceedingly rare aviarist who can see each person’s invisible nightjar, a bird that is a mirror of the soul that it guards. She can even hone the talent to perceive a person’s emotions and memories. A man named Crowley tells Alice she’s in danger, and an attempted kidnapping causes an accident that puts Alice’s best friend, Jen, in a coma. To save her, Alice must reunite Jen with her nightjar, which fled in confusion when Jen was injured. Crowley offers to help Alice control her magic and whisks her off to the Rookery, an alternate “sister-city” of London, but they’re threatened by the powerful Judicium, who want to destroy people like Alice, and the leader of a death cult. Hewitt makes it easy to picture the 1930s-infused Rookery, where magic comes as naturally as breathing, and readers will be fascinated by the story’s magic, largely based in Finnish lore. It’s a delight to explore the Rookery alongside Alice as she discovers her unusual powers and races to save her friend. The wildly imaginative Hewitt is a writer to watch.(Publisher’s Weekly, 15 July 2019)
Murder at Kensington Palace / Andrea Penrose
In the third Wrexford & Sloane mystery, a man is found murdered and disfigured after attending a science research gathering. The victim is the cousin of Charlotte Sloane, cartoonist and amateur sleuth. When the victim’s twin brother is accused of committing the crime, Charlotte teams up once again with the logically minded Earl of Wrexford to track down the true culprit. In order to further the investigation, Charlotte must decide whether to reveal her secret high-class pedigree, which will allow her easy access to potential suspects in the upper echelons of society. Meanwhile, Wrexford uses his connections in the scientific world to delve into the burgeoning developments of electricity, as the victim’s body displayed unusual burn marks. Penrose deftly intertwines the politics of navigating Regency-era society, scientific progress, and the deepening relationship between the protagonists. Series fans will enjoy revisiting the lively cast of characters, while historical fiction readers will be satisfied by the immersive, richly detailed mystery. (Library Journal, 23 August 2019)
Lampedusa / Steven Price
Price (By Gaslight) illuminates in fine fictionalized fashion the last years of Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa as he struggles to write one of the glories of Italian literature, his only novel, The Leopard. In January 1955, Lampedusa is diagnosed with advanced emphysema. His marriage childless, Lampedusa wants to leave something behind after his death and comes up with the idea of a novel that takes place during Garibaldi’s invasion of Sicily in 1860. The result is The Leopard, an intimate epic of the dying social order in 19th-century Sicily, mirrored by Lampedusa’s observations about his own dying social order in the 20th. While writing, Lampedusa visits the remains of the family estate in Palma, considers adopting a young friend in order to pass on his title of duke, and reminisces about fighting on the Italian Front during WWI and meeting his wife, Alessandra, in London in 1925. Though light on plot, Price vividly recreates an Italy transitioning from postwar austerity to the beginnings of La Dolce Vita, juxtaposing crumbling palazzos with sleek, supercharged sports cars. Price makes Lampedusa as compelling a figure as Lampedusa’s hero, Prince Don Fabrizio Salina. Readers will savor this rich look at Italian history. (Publishers Weekly, 29 July 2019)
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AUDIOBOOKS
| Biography | Glaisher, James | The aeronauts |
| General novels | Blanchard, Katie | Pressing flowers |
| Historical novels | Scott, Susan Holloway | Duchess |
| Mystery | Blackmoore, Stephanie | Gown with the wind |
| Mystery | Dumont, Diana | Birthday pie burial |
| Mystery | Ellis, Joy | Darkness on the Fens |
| Mystery | Penrose, Andrea | Sweet revenge |
| Mystery | Rosett, Sara | Murder at Blackburn Hall |
| Non fiction | Manson, Mark | The subtle art of not giving a f*ck |
| Romance | Banks, Maya | Until midnight |
The subtle art of not giving a f*ck / Mark Manson
There’s a lot of wisdom in this in-your-face personal growth audio, which is notable for its contrarian advice and a narrative style that sounds at once hip and adolescent. Actor and voice-over pro Roger Wayne captures most of Manson’s oppositional energy, and he narrates with a lively engagement that only occasionally sounds overdone. Wayne’s likability helps to moderate the writer’s often bombastic writing. Manson, a popular and controversial blogger, uses over-the-top rhetoric and powerful stories to urge his listeners to be more honest with themselves, less accepting of personal growth orthodoxy, and more realistic about the suffering that comes with any kind of striving. (Audiofile, 2016)
Murder at Blackburn Hall / Sara Rosett
Rosett’s lively sequel to Murder at Archly Manor continues the adventures of plucky Olive Belgrave, a young gentlewoman who has fallen on hard times in post-WWI England, but who has a talent for solving mysteries. Olive’s new client, London publisher Vernon Hightower, asks her to find missing author R.W. May, whose mystery novels are the financial mainstay of Hightower Books. Olive sets off for the village of Hadsworth in Kent, where the writer is believed to reside. To keep her inquiries discreet, Olive poses as the publisher’s assistant and stays with Lady Holt of Blackburn Hall, who believes that Olive is there to assess her book on etiquette. When a rainstorm unearths a body, the police consider the death to be an accident; Olive disagrees. A second death quickly follows. Olive’s dashing friend Jasper Rimington arrives and offers to be her Watson, saying, “I’d prefer Sherlock, of course, but that role seems to be taken.” Olive’s charming narrative voice effortlessly pulls the reader into a world full of surprising and fascinating period details. Fans of light historicals will be satisfied. (Publishers Weekly, 8 July 2019)
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New Books — October 2019
The new books for October 2019 are now available to borrow, with new ebooks and audiobooks.
We hope you enjoy them!
- New books may be borrowed for a period of two weeks only and may not be renewed.
- Books remain listed as “New Books” for two months.
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