NUMBER: 106

Genre: Fiction; Origin: Australia; Pages: 150

Satisfaction rating: 8.0

OVERVIEW:

David Malouf’s imagination inhabits shocking violence, quick humor, appealing warmth and harsh cruelty with equal intensity. He shares tales of bookish boys, taciturn men and intimate stories of men and women looking for something they seem to have missed, or missed out on.

This is a comprehensive compilation of Malouf’s shorter work. Stories are set in the stark and challenging Australian interior and the more lush and mysterious coastal enclaves; others are set in Australia’s past. The youthful dreams, physical desires and mental despair of Malouf’s richly varied characters as they explore their place in the world are always moving and universal.

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NUMBER: 105

Genre: Fiction; Origin: Australia; Pages: 150

Satisfaction rating: 7.0

OVERVIEW:

A tale of love and loneliness in two parallel stories. Arabella Thorne, a cultured and eccentric schoolmistress, travels to Europe accompanied by a shy schoolgirl and the jealous Miss Edgely. Meanwhile, the Australian novelist Diana Hopewell answers a letter from Miss Peabody, an incompetent clerical worker living in a London suburb, and the ensuing correspondence between the two women changes Miss Peabody’s life and personality dramatically.

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NUMBER: 98

Genre: Fiction; Origin: Australia; Pages: 100

Satisfaction rating: 9.5

OVERVIEW:

The Aunt’s Story traces the uncompromisingly independent career of Theodora Goodman from the dusty reality of Australia to to the whirling madhouse of Europe before World War II, and ends calmly, although across the boarders of sanity, in that most practical of countries, the United States of America.

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NUMBER: 90

Genre: Fiction; Origin: Canada; Pages: 150

Satisfaction rating: 10.0

OVERVIEW:

At the turn of the century, the Storyville district of New Orleans had some 2,000 prostitutes, 70 professional gamblers, and 30 piano players. It had only one man who played the cornet like Buddy Bolden. By day he cut hair and purveyed gossip at N. Joseph’s Shaving Parlor. At night he played jazz as though unleashing wild animals in a crowded room. At the age of thirty-one, Buddy Bolden went mad.

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NUMBER: 88

Genre: Non-fiction; Origin: France; Pages: 100

Satisfaction rating: 1.0

OVERVIEW:

Simone de Beauvoir records the final days of her mother’s losing battle with cancer, the clinical humiliations of a proud woman and the unforeseen flashes of love and hostility at the bedside.

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