SMSA (Sydney Mechanics’ School of Arts)
ANIMAL STORIES
| Glover, Richard | Love Clancy |
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BIOGRAPHY
| Brierley, Sue | Lioness |
| Forsyth, Kate | Searching for Charlotte |
| Kahn, Ronni | A repurposed life |
| Mullins, Patrick | Tiberius with a telephone |
| White, Jessica | Hearing Maud |
A repurposed life / Ronnie Kahn
Find out how OzHarvest charity queen and internationally renowned leader Ronni Kahn found her true calling in this passionately uplifting memoir, A Repurposed Life. As the owner of a successful events company, throwing away huge volumes of leftover food at the end of the day came with the territory. But when Ronni Kahn hit midlife, she found herself no longer able to turn a blind eye to her food waste problem. Hand delivering the untouched food to homeless shelters around Sydney became her renegade solution. Little did she know that fixing her small problem at work would lead her to unlock a hidden purpose at the very core of her inner life. Now founder and CEO of the food rescue organisation OzHarvest, Ronni leads hundreds of staff and thousands of volunteers with the goal to nourish Australia. She serves in an advisory capacity to government and is an instrumental leader in changing federal laws to improve social justice and environmental policies. A Repurposed Life is the story of how Ronni found her voice, her heart and her deepest calling. From her early years growing up under the brutal system of apartheid South Africa, to a socialist commune in Israel, Ronni finally settled in Australia to discover a profound new way of living. Shared with the humour, warmth and energy that have made her an internationally renowned keynote speaker, this heartfelt exploration of the choices that define us will speak to anyone seeking a more passionate expression of being alive. (Arts Reviews, October 2020)
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CLASSICS
| Shute, Nevil | An old captivity |
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GENERAL FICTION
| Alexandra, Belinda | The mystery woman |
| Amis, Martin | Inside story |
| Bendon, Carmel | Grasping at water |
| Cruz, Angie | Dominicana |
| Cumming, Charles | Box 88 |
| Emezi, Akwaeke | The death of Vivek Oji |
| FitzGerald, Helen | Ash Mountain |
| Gallen, Michelle | Big girl, small town |
| Haig, Matt | The midnight library |
| Hughes, John | No one |
| Mason, Meg | Sorrow and bliss |
| Mundell, Meg | The trespassers |
| Petrie, Nicholas | The wild one |
| Salom, Philip | The returns |
| Sligar, Sara | Take me apart |
| Smiley, Jane | Perestroika in Paris |
| Vilas, Manuel | Ordesa |
| Walter, Jess | The cold millions |
Inside story / Martin Amis
Amis surveys a long, productive life in a deeply engaging “novelised autobiography” that focuses on love and death. “The book,” he writes in a long preface, “is about a life, my own, so it won’t read like a novel.” So, prepare to wonder what is fact and what is “novelised.” The new volume, which runs from the 1970s to 2019, overlaps Amis’ memoir, Experience (2000), which went up to late 1999. It resembles Sebald’s influential genre-straddlers with the inclusion of photos, like those of its “three principals,” Saul Bellow, Philip Larkin, and Christopher Hitchens, whose talents are celebrated and whose deaths are touchingly portrayed. Amis marks historical events and makes “essayistic detours.” He encapsulates “the erotic picaresque of [his] early adulthood” in the apparently fictional Phoebe Phelps, one of several strong women in a male-heavy work. Her saga runs from a first meeting in 1976 through a four-year relationship with less sex and more tedium than one might expect, several sly narrative twists, and a last visit more than 40 years later. Amis writes with admiration and affection of encounters with Bellow, including the onset and deepening of the older writer’s dementia. The material on Larkin, an intimate of Kingsley Amis’, delights in the poetry without ignoring the man’s complex and sometimes unpleasant personal life. The remaining principal, Hitchens, is a constant presence and comes to dominate the book after he’s diagnosed with cancer. The eloquence Amis displays here, the understated play of the two men’s attachment, makes it possible to forgive the boys-clubbiness that often colors scenes with his closest friend. The book is almost everywhere wonderfully readable, rich in the familiar Amis pleasures of wit, insight, and well-formed anecdotes. As for how much those pleasures derive from real life or fiction, let’s award the benefit of the doubt to the artist behind both. An intriguing, often brilliant addition to a storied career. (Kirkus Reviews, August 2020)
The death of Vivi Ojek / Akwaeke Emezi
The author of the young adult novel Pet, a finalist for the 2019 National Book Award, offers another exploration of gender identity, this time for adults. This book’s title leaves no doubt about the fate of its central character. Nor does the first chapter, which is one sentence long: “They burned down the market on the day Vivek Oji died.” Then the story moves into the past to introduce Vivek’s father, Chika, as he is about to meet Kavita, the woman who will become his wife and Vivek’s mother. The next chapter is told from the perspective of Vivek’s cousin, Osita. As the narrative moves around in time and from viewpoint to viewpoint, Emezi offers a richly textured depiction of a middle-class community in Nigeria—one that includes several immigrants, among them Vivek’s Indian mother. In these early chapters, there is no sense of the tragedy that’s coming. The first hint of trouble ahead is when Vivek starts slipping into fugue states. Eventually, Vivek will explain that these were moments when the burden of living an inauthentic life became too much to bear. When Vivek lets his hair grow long and acknowledges his true sexuality, he experiences some relief from this stress, but new problems arise—including an aunt who thinks he’s possessed by demons and boys who throw bottles at him. He is only just beginning to express his true self openly when he dies. Only a handful of chapters—most of them very brief—are told from Vivek’s point of view. There’s something heartbreaking about the fact that his story can only be told by others, especially since some of them never saw him as he wanted to be seen. And Osita—who loved Vivek and knew him better than anyone—cannot say everything he knows. Even so, the novel ends on a note of hope. Vividly written and deeply affecting. (Kirkus Reviews, June 2020)
Big girl, small town / Michelle Gallen
In a small town in post-conflict Northern Ireland, a young woman working in a chip shop observes the lives—and contemplates the secrets—of her regular customers as she attempts to make sense of her own. Majella O’Neill—who lives with her alcoholic mother, longs for her missing father, and mourns her recently murdered grandmother—is the cleareyed narrator of a novel that spans just one week, from workday Monday to pub-night Sunday, but that also returns intermittently to bittersweet scenes from childhood. The plot hinges, quite shakily, on the recent and brutal murder of Majella’s grandmother, and its turning point is the reading of her will. But the novel’s vitality resides in Majella’s deadpan observations (“She got her timing from her da. He always caught glasses before they hit the floor, her ma before she passed out”) and in the acutely replicated dialogue that constitutes much of the narrative (“What about ye, Iggy? Ah’m all right. What about you? Grand. Surviving”). Like a stage play, the novel unfolds in nightly scenes at a chip shop called A Salt and Battered! where Majella serves the drunks, waifs, and assorted locals that the reader comes to know as well as she does. The only disappointment is an abrupt ending that brings the curtain down too quickly. An irreverent portrait of small-town Northern Ireland that is both bleakly and uproariously funny. (Kirkus Reviews, October 2020)
The midnight library / Matt Haig
Haig draws on quantum wave theory in this charming if sometimes laborious account of the many possible lives of a depressed woman. Nora, in her mid-30s and living in the small English town of Bedford, suffers from “situational depression”—though, as she wryly observes, “It’s just that I keep on having new… situations.” After she gets fired from her job and her cat dies, she attempts suicide, only to wake up in a book-lined liminal zone, where she is guided by a librarian: “Between life and death there is a library… Every book provides a chance to try another life you could have lived.” There, Nora discovers what would have happened had she not abandoned her promising swimming career, called off her engagement, or left the rock band she started with her brother. Each time an alternate life disappoints or doesn’t feel quite right, Nora exits, reappearing in the library to continue browsing for the perfect story. While the formula grows repetitive, the set changes provide novelty, as Haig whisks Nora from Australian beaches to a South American rock concert tour to an Arctic encounter with a polar bear. Haig’s agreeable narrative voice and imagination will reward readers who take this book off the shelf. (Publishers Weekly, September 2020)
Sorrow and bliss / Meg Mason
Martha loves her husband, Patrick. Or does she? While Patrick has been in love with her since he was 14, for Martha, Patrick is like a sofa – he’s just always been there. And while he once embodied safety and security, now Martha is angry that Patrick, despite being a loving husband and a doctor, did not realise or diagnose that she was mentally ill.When she was 17, Martha felt like a bomb went off in her brain and, since then, she has suffered bouts of depression, misery and endless crying. Doctors have not been able to diagnose a reason and Martha thinks she is just overly sensitive to the world and doesn’t know how to be a person like everyone else. She drifts through jobs and failed relationships, all the time supported by a loving family that includes her adored sister, Ingrid. By the time Martha finds out what is wrong with her, it is too late for her to have the one thing she has always wanted. Her family can’t prop her up forever. But maybe she will discover that it’s possible to start again, from nothing, if she can find something else to want. This novel covers the messy gamut of life’s ups and downs. It is sad and funny, angry and witty. The torment of Martha’s mental illness is clearly captured but the sadness is lightened by humour and empathy. This story felt real and I was completely captivated. (Good Reading Magazine, September 2020)
Take me apart / Sara Sligar
An ex-journalist falls into a churning vortex of dark secrets when she’s hired to archive a famous photographer’s personal effects. In 2017, after a harrowing incident ruined 30-year-old Kate Aitken’s journalism career, she’s eager to leave New York for sunny California and the idyllic little hamlet of Callinas, where her sweet but nosy Aunt Louise and Uncle Frank will put her up while she archives the tangible remains of controversial photographer Miranda Brand’s life and work, a gig they hooked her up with. Miranda’s husband, Jake, a painter, has recently died, leaving their son, Theo, with a hoarder’s paradise of letters, documents, and possibly even a few of Miranda’s viscerally intimate photos, which would be worth a fortune. Kate’s first meeting with the enigmatic Theo, who’s recently been divorced, is tense, but Theo’s two small children, Jemima and Oscar, dull his sharp edges, and Kate soon becomes so immersed in her work that returning to Louise and Frank’s home every evening is akin to waking from a fever dream. And they’re eager for details. Miranda’s death at 37 was ruled a suicide, but questions remain, and rumors, such as then 11-year-old Theo’s possible culpability, persist. Kate, bound by a nondisclosure agreement, must remain silent but wonders if Miranda might have actually been murdered. When Kate discovers Miranda’s diary, which often reads like dark poetry, she begins to feel an uneasy kinship with the artist, whose life was fractured by domestic violence, mental illness, and the inexorable demands of fame, motherhood, and the creative process. Kate’s obsessive inquiry into Miranda’s death and her growing attraction to Theo soon threaten to unravel the delicate threads of her new life and her increasingly precarious state of mind. Kate and Miranda are vividly rendered, and an entire novel could easily be crafted out of Miranda’s fascinating diary, letters, and other ephemera, snippets of which are sprinkled liberally throughout. Sligar delivers an intriguing mystery while tackling big themes, especially sexism and the societal restraints placed on women’s bodies and minds. The results are spellbinding. A raw and sophisticated debut. (Kirkus Reviews, February 2020)
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HISTORICAL FICTION
| Goldsworthy, Adrian Keith | True soldier gentlemen |
| Williams, Sue | Elizabeth and Elizabeth |
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MYSTERY
| Carter, Alan | Doom Creek |
| Conyer, Natalie | Present tense |
| de Jager, Anja | Death at the orange locks |
| Fellowes, Jessica | The Mitford trial |
| Fowler, Christopher | Bryant & May: England’s finest |
| Gray, Alex | When shadows fall |
| Holt, Anne | A necessary death |
| MacRae, Molly | Heather and homicide |
| McGowan, Claire | The push |
| McLaren, Philip | Scream black murder |
| Moss, Tara | The war widow |
| Nadel, Barbara | A time to die |
| Nesser, Hakan | The secret life of Mr Roos |
| Pine, Alex | The Christmas killer |
| Pinkerton, Allan | Bank robbers and the detectives |
| Seeck, Max | The witch hunter |
| Spotswood, Stephen | Fortune favours the dead |
The war widow / Tara Moss
Set in 1946, this spirted series launch from Canadian-Australian author Moss introduces Billie Walker, a former war correspondent who reopens her dead father’s private inquiry firm after the Sydney newspapers she works for sideline her. When German immigrant Netanya Brown hires Billie to find her 17-year-old son, Adin, Billie assumes the boy is off with friends or a secret lover; then she discovers that before Adin disappeared, he’d been nosing around an exclusive night club and expressed uncharacteristic interest in a high-end auction. After a potential source is murdered and an encounter with the cops suggests they’re on the take, Billie is forced to admit that she’s dealing with something much larger than a simple missing persons case. Meanwhile, a young Wiradjuri woman asks Billie to investigate a foreigner suspected of mistreating his Aboriginal employees. Rich period detail and a fierce, feminist heroine distinguish this stylish twist on the classic 1940s detective novel. Moss’s thoughtful, socially conscious plotting largely compensates for the contrived conclusion. Fans of Phryne Fisher will eagerly anticipate Billie’s next adventure. (Publishers Weekly, May 2020)
The witch hunter / Max Seeck
A desperate hunt for what may be a gang of serial killers flushes out a policewoman’s haunting past in Finnish author Seeck’s first English translation. The body of a famous author’s wife is discovered in what appears to be a deliberately staged pose, dressed in a black gown with black painted nails and a ghastly grin. Another almost identical woman is found under the ice of a nearby lake. The author, Roger Koponen, is out of town at a book signing, where an audience member asks some odd questions. While a police officer is driving him back to Helsinki, communications are lost, and two bodies are soon found burned in the woods. The police realize that the deaths are re-created scenes from Koponen’s popular Witch Hunt trilogy and fear that more may follow. Sgt. Jessica Niemi’s dying boss, Erne Mikson, the only person on the Helsinki police force who knows she’s a very wealthy woman, puts her in charge of the case. Mikson, long Jessica’s father figure, knows her disturbingly dysfunctional background, which is slowly revealed as she’s personally drawn into the mystifying case by her striking resemblance to several of the victims. Jessica’s team works tirelessly to uncover suspects and motives as more gruesome murders related to witches occur until Mikson fears that Jessica herself may be a target. The apparent resurrection of Koponen’s cellphone and his image caught on surveillance cameras only make the case more confusing for the officers, who have very different thoughts about who’s involved. The heroine’s personal problems provide a fascinating counterpoint to a disturbing tale of murder and madness. (Kirkus Reviews, September 2020)
Fortune favours the dead / Stephen Spotswood
A sprightly period debut that shows New York’s preeminent female detective and her assistant plying their trade in 1945. When the matriarch of the well-to-do Collins family is bashed to death by a crystal ball in a locked room, her relatives ask Lillian Pentecost to look into the case. Despite its wealth, the family has already seen its share of troubles. Abigail Collins’ husband, steel magnate Alistair Collins, shot himself a year ago. Before her own death, Abigail was consulting psychic Ariel Belestrade, whose practices are so questionable that she’s being investigated by skeptical anthropology professor Olivia Waterhouse. And problems continue without missing a beat. Shortly after Harrison Wallace, the acting CEO of Collins Steelworks and Manufacturing, hires Lillian, Rebecca Collins, Abigail’s saucy daughter and Wallace’s goddaughter, starts hitting on Willowjean Parker, the assistant Lillian hired away from a circus and trained as her assistant and successor. Will is both responsive to and disconcerted by Becca’s overtures; certainly she’d rather get kissed by Becca than beaten by the unseen enemy who attacks her moments after their most recent tête-à-tête. Spotswood supplies scattershot period detail (Will presciently calls Lillian “Ms. Pentecost” in 1945), mild wisecracks, an anticlimactic solution to that locked-room puzzle, and a Chinese box of denouements: If your chosen suspect isn’t pronounced guilty, just wait a few pages. The most striking feature is the provocative gender-flipping of Nero Wolfe and Archie Goodwin. (Kirkus Reviews, August 2020)
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NON FICTION
| FitzSimons, Peter | Breaker Morant | 968.048 FITZ |
| Knight, Dominic | The 2020 dictionary | 827.4 KNIG |
| Latham, Martin | The bookseller’s tale. | 381.4500209 LATH |
| Macintyre, Dawn | Living with chronic pain | 616.04 MACI |
| Manning, Paddy | Body count | 363.73 MANN |
| Walter-Toews | On pandemics | 614.5 WALT |
Body count / Paddy Manning
It’s easy to compartmentalise climate change as something amorphous; it gets dumbed down by statistics and endless hypotheticals, buzzwords and technical mumbo-jumbo. The reality is that it’s killing us right now, and that became clearer with the 2019/20 summer bushfires. It’s also become clear with Paddy Manning’s book Body Count. Body Count collates tonnes of research and interviews to put a human face on the lives impacted by our worsening climate crisis. He recounts events we may have already forgotten – like the 2011 Brisbane floods, or Black Saturday in Victoria – and shows climate disaster effects us, our families, our communities and our country. There’s a clear thread running through the stories; things are getting worse, as is our ability to prepare. Manning also highlights the hidden disasters working in the background, like rising heatwaves putting pressure on our healthcare systems and killing more people than all other catastrophes combined, or soil-borne diseases wreaking havoc after momentous floods. The book shows that climate change isn’t one big thing, but a mass of small things building together slowly but surely against us. Obviously, the book has a bit of a left lean to it, but Manning lets the voice of the people – whether they be victims of climate disasters, or scientists fighting it – take precedence over his own. While many believe they are victims of climate change, others are not so convinced – it’s an interesting look at how attitudes shift, or don’t shift, as things get worse. Most apparent from Body Count is the sense of community throughout the book. There are stories of heroism and hope that provide a silver lining to the book’s doom and gloom. (Good Reading Magazine, September 2020)
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TRAVEL
| Harper, Melissa | The ways of the bushwalker |
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New additions to eBooks at SMSA
EBOOKS
| Animal stories | Cotter, Andrew | Olive, Mabel and me |
| General novels | Carr, Robyn | Sunrise on Half Moon Bay |
| General novels | Greaves, Abbie | The silent treatment |
| General novels | Laguna, Sofie | Infinite splendours |
| General novels | Riwoe, Mirandi | Stone sky gold mountain |
| Historical novels | Grenville, Kate | A room made of leaves |
| Mystery | Döblin, Alfred | Two women and a poisoning |
| Mystery | MacBride, Stuart | The coffinmaker’s garden |
| Mystery | McCourt, Kellie | Heiress on fire |
| Mystery | Whitney, Rebecca | The hidden girls |
The silent treatment / Abbie Greaves
Greaves’s confident, bittersweet debut explores an unhappy married couple’s enduring love. After Maggie, Frank’s wife of 40 years, is induced into a coma following an apparent suicide attempt, Frank spends hours at her hospital bedside. Despite Frank’s shame and reluctance, a persistent nurse encourages Frank to talk to his inert wife. What the nurse doesn’t know, however, is that Frank and Maggie haven’t spoken to one another in six months. The reasons for their silence unfold in dual narratives of their courtship, marriage, and heartbreaking journey through parenthood, related first in Frank’s bedside confession and later in Maggie’s letters that he finds. After years of childlessness early in their marriage, Frank and Maggie were overjoyed at the birth of their daughter, Eleanor, now a college dropout. The bliss faded as Eleanor suffered from depression and drug addiction as a teenager. While Greaves’s choice to tell the story through both Frank’s and Maggie’s voices yields occasional moments of redundancy, she finds a poignant distance between their perspectives. Greaves creates an affecting sense of irony: Maggie and Frank adore one another, but retreat into silence instead of finding strength by sharing their heartache and facing their struggles together. While this affecting tale covers well-trod ground, it still packs an emotional punch. (Publishers Weekly, April 2020)
Stone sky gold mountain / Mirandi Riwoe
A brother and a sister arrive in a North Queensland shanty town during the gold rush in 1877. Lai Yue and Ying have escaped poverty and potential slavery in China to a different kind of bondage in Australia. They work for a ‘syndicate’ in exchange for the dream of finding enough gold to pay their way back to their ancestral village. Conditions in the camp are appalling and hunger is the drumbeat that follows them along with the risk of discovery (Ying disguises herself as a boy). This novel is like a crash course in colonial architecture with disease, poverty, exploitation, gambling, white misogyny and black terror shown to be the building blocks of a new empire. It is an Australian novel with a difference. It looks unflinchingly at the plight of Chinese labourers in Queensland and their interactions with other immigrant, Indigenous and white folk, while firmly privileging the non-Anglo point of view. The narrative includes an unusual and barrier-breaking friendship between Ying and Meriem, the white girl ostracised by the town because she works for a sex worker. There are kindnesses in unexpected places. Despite hunger and deprivation, Ying finds comfort in working for the kindly Jimmy, in her relationship with Meriem, and in becoming her own person away from her unhappy and ultimately self-destructive brother. In its exploration of race, language, privilege, class, exile and identity, Riwoe’s novel is transcendental and transformative. It offers no easy solutions to the ongoing dilemmas of outsiders vs insiders, about who speaks and who listens, about criminality and marginality. A white man may beat a white woman senseless if she happens to be a prostitute, a Chinese man may steal the identity of a fellow worker and watch him led away to certain death, two women with not even a language in common may find solace in their bodies. Riwoe does not shy away from uncomfortable truths. Her depiction of the downtrodden, itinerant Chinese community who ally themselves with white men against ‘the natives’ is an extension of Australia’s violent interaction with its Indigenous population post-colonisation. Stone Sky Gold Mountain deserves to be widely read, discussed and reviewed, not only because of its resurrection of a little-known portion of our history, but also because it is beautifully written, with lyric sensitivity and a feminist sensibility. (Artshub, 24 March 2020)
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AUDIOBOOKS
| General novels | Hahn, Sumi | The mermaid from Jeju |
| General novels | Murakami, Haruki | The strange library |
| Mystery | Castle, Anne | Death by disputation |
| Mystery | Harper, Karen | Deep in the Alaskan woods |
| Mystery | Shelton, Paige | Cold wind |
| Mystery | Tyson, Wendy | Seeds of revenge |
| Mystery | Walters, Alex | Dark corners |
| Mystery | Weinberger, Andy | Reason to kill |
| Romance | Quinn, Julie | The Duke and I |
| Science fiction and fantasy | Onyebuchi, Tochi | Riot baby |
The mermaid from Jeju / Sumi Hahn
Hahn’s sweeping debut follows a girl growing up on the Korean island of Jeju in the lead up to U.S. intervention. In 1944, one year before the American occupation of southern Korea begins, 18-year-old Junja has just completed the haenyeo rite of passage, meaning she’s now responsible for providing for her family by diving for mollusks. After Junja convinces her mother to let her take an annual trip to Hallasan in her mother’s place, to pay respects to the sacred mountain, the narrative picks up speed. On her way, Junja encounters two figures who will become pivotal to the Communist rebels in Jeju: Lieutenant Lee, a military officer whose loyalties secretly reside with the people of Jeju whom the Americans have labeled Communist, and who takes an interest in Junja’s family; and Suwol, a boy who shifts gears on his way to becoming a scholar to join the Communists. As Suwol goes on rebel missions while the Americans battle alongside nationalist soldiers against Communists, his relationship with Junja deepens. The star-crossed lovers finally come close to marrying when fate intervenes. Meanwhile, Lee shares information about Suwol with Junja, and even helps rescue Suwol after he’s captured by nationalist soldiers. Hahn brilliantly carries the reader through Junja’s life with interstitial chapters set in 2001, shortly after her death. With constant tension, the novel masterfully captures the devastating effects of loss and grief, and what people must do to survive war. (Publishers Weekly, October 2020)
The strange library / Haruki Murakami
A boy’s routine day at the public library becomes a trip down the rabbit hole in Murakami’s short novel. The boy meets a demanding old man, who forces him to read the books he’s requested in a hidden reading room in the basement. After following the labyrinthine corridors, the boy is led by the old man into a cell, where he must memorize the history of tax collection in the Ottoman Empire. In the bowels of the library, the boy meets a beautiful, mute girl who brings him meals, as well as a subservient sheepman (whom we also meet in Murakami’s A Wild Sheep Chase) who fixes the boy crispy doughnuts and clues him in to the old man’s sadistic plans. Full-page designs from Chip Kidd divide the sections, bolstering the book’s otherworldliness with images from the text alongside mazelike designs and dizzying close-ups of painted faces. This dryly funny, concise fable features all the hallmarks of Murakami’s deadpan magic, along with splashes of Lewis Carroll and the brothers Grimm. (Publishers Weekly, September 2014)
Seeds of revenge / Wendy Tyson
A chance encounter involves an organic farmer in a case of murder.On the way home from a trip to sell winter greens to Philadelphia chefs, former lawyer Megan Sawyer picks up Becca Fox, whose car has died on her way to Winsome, Pennsylvania. Becca, a chemist, is on her way to visit her aunt Merry, who’s offered to let her set up a display of modern love potions in her store. But Becca feels no love for her estranged father, Paul, a psychologist-turned-investment adviser whom Merry’s invited to the town they’d lived in years ago hoping that he and Becca will reconcile. That seems unlikely, since Becca’s convinced that Paul murdered her mother. Megan, who runs an organic farm with her grandmother Bibi and has a romantic relationship with local veterinarian “Denver” Finn, knows what a difficult family situation can be like because her own mother walked out on her when she was a child. When Paul is found dead, killed by phosgene gas, Becca, who hated her father and had the knowledge to create the phosgene, is the obvious suspect. Megan’s assisted the police before and police chief Bobby King is only too glad to get her help again. Megan soon learns what a sleazy person Paul was. His first wife died in an accident, and he cheated on Becca’s mother. He once worked with Denver’s aunt, a physician who got rid of him when she realized he was harming his patients. He also had a strange relationship with Megan’s aunt Sarah, a famous mystery writer whose novels may have provided a template for the murder.Tyson’s third look at the joys and perils of small-town life features enough engaging characters to offset the transparent mystery. (Kirkus Reviews, October 2017)
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New Books – January 2021
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- 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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