NUMBER: 91

Genre: Fiction; Origin: Australia; Pages: 450

Satisfaction rating: 8.5

OVERVIEW:

In the winter of 1954, in a construction camp in the remote Tasmanian highlands, when Sonja Buloh was three years old and her father was drinking too much, Sonja’s mother walked into a blizzard never to return. Some thirty-five years later, when Sonja visits Tasmania and her drunkard father, the shadows of the past begin to intrude ever more forcefully into the present – changing forever his living death and her ordered life.

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NUMBER: 89

Genre: Fiction; Origin: UK; Pages: 350

Satisfaction rating: 5.5

OVERVIEW:

Ever After spans two centuries and settings from the adulterous bedrooms of postwar Paris to the contemporary entanglements in the groves of academe. It is the story of Bill Unwin, a man haunted by the death of his beautify wife and a survivor himself of a recent brush with mortality. And although it touches on Darwin and dinosaurs, bees and bridge builders, the true subject of Ever After is nothing less than the eternal question, “Why should things matter?”

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NUMBER: 86

Genre: Fiction; Origin: USA; Pages: 350

Satisfaction rating: 8.0

OVERVIEW:

Starring: Sissy Hanshaw - flawlessly beautiful, almost. A small-town girl with big-time dreams and a quirk to match: hitchhiking her way into your heart, your hopes, and your sleeping bags. Featuring: Bonanza Jellybean and the smooth-riding cowgirls of Rubber Rose Ranch; Chink, lascivious guru of yams and yang; Julian, Mohawk by birth - asthmatic esthete and husband by disposition; Dr. Robbins, preventive psychiatrist and reality instructor. Follow Sissy’s amazing odyssey from Virginia to chic Manhattan to the Dakota Badlands, where FBI agents, cowgirls, and ecstatic whooping cranes explode in a deliciously drawn-out climax.

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NUMBER: 85

Genre: Fiction; Origin: Australia; Pages: 300

Satisfaction rating: 6.5

His Illegal Self is the story of Che — raised in isolated privilege by his New York grandmother, he is the precocious son of radical student activists at Harvard in the late sixties. Yearning for his famous outlaw parents, denied all access to television and the news, he takes hope from his long-haired teenage neighbor, who predicts, ‘They will come for you, man. They’ll break you out of here’.

Soon Che too is an outlaw: fleeing down subways, abandoning seedy motels at night, he is pitched into a journey that leads him to a hippie commune in the jungle of tropical Queensland. Here he slowly, bravely confronts his life, learning that nothing is what it seems. Who is his real mother? Was that his real father? If all he suspects is true, what should he do?

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NUMBER: 84

Genre: Fiction; Origin: Australia; Pages: 200

Satisfaction rating: 10.0

OVERVIEW:

Helen lovingly prepares her spare room for her friend Nicola. She is coming to visit for three weeks, to receive treatment she believes will cure her cancer. From the moment Nicola staggers off the plane, gaunt and hoarse but still somehow grand, Helen becomes her nurse, her guardian angel and her stony judge. The Spare Room tells a story of compassion, humour and rage. The two women – one sceptical, one stubbornly serene – negotiate an unmapped path through Nicola’s bizarre therapy, stumbling toward’s the novel’s terrible and transcendent finale.

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