Book club suggestions

Need some help deciding what your book club should read next? Here are some of our suggestions but don't forget we love to help with recommendations in store as well!

(Although we don't run any book clubs through the shop, if you are interested in buying a set of books for your book club, we will happily order them in for you and, depending on the quantity, can arrange discounts for multiple copies. Please note that many of our suppliers will take approximately two weeks to fill orders, so if you'd like us to supply you with copies for a group, you'll need to plan ahead so that the books arrive in plenty of time for even your slowest readers to get them read before you meet!)

If you can't find what you are after, please contact us via our enquiries page.

The Museum of Modern LoveCover Image, Art Making

Heather Rose
Allen and Unwin
ISBN 9781760291860     
Trade Paperback 2016
Price $AU 27.99
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'This is a weirdly beautiful book.' David Walsh founder and curator, MONA. 

Arky Levin is a film composer in New York separated from his wife, who has asked him to keep one devastating promise. One day he finds his way to The Atrium at MOMA and sees Marina Abramovic in The Artist is Present. The performance continues for seventy-five days and, as it unfolds, so does Arky. As he watches and meets other people drawn to the exhibit, he slowly starts to understand what might be missing in his life and what he must do...This dazzlingly original novel asks beguiling questions about the nature of art, life and love and finds a way to answer them.  Heather was the inaugural Writer in Residence at The Museum of Old and New Art (MoNA) in Hobart 2012-13 where she did much of the research for The Museum of Modern Love. 

Winner of the Stella Prize 2017.


The Underground Railroad
Cover Image, The Heart Goes Last

Colson Whitehead
Doubleday
ISBN 9780708898406
Paperback 2017
Price $AU 19.99
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Cora is a slave on a cotton plantation in Georgia. Caesar, a recent arrival from Virginia, tells her about the Underground Railroad, and they plot their escape. Matters do not go as planned - Cora kills a young white boy who tries to capture her - but they manage to find a station and head north. Cora embarks on a harrowing journey, state-by-state, seeking true freedom. Like Gulliver, Cora encounters different worlds at each stage of her journey - Whitehead brilliantly recreates the unique terrors for black people in states in the pre-Civil War era. The Underground Railroad is at once a kinetic adventure tale of one woman's ferocious will to escape the horrors of bondage, and a shattering, powerful meditation on the history we all share.

Winner of the Pulitzer Prize 2017.


The North Water

Cover Image, North Water

Ian McGuire
Scribner
Genre: Fiction
ISBN 9781471151262     
Paperback 2016
Price $AU 19.99 
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1859, A ship sets sail with a killer on board. A man joins a whaling ship bound for the Arctic Circle. Having left the British Army with his reputation in tatters, Patrick Sumner has little option but to accept the position of ship's surgeon on this ill-fated voyage. But when, deep into the journey, a cabin boy is discovered brutally killed, Sumner finds himself forced to act. Soon he will face an evil even greater than he had encountered at the siege of Delhi, in the shape of Henry Drax: harpooner, murderer, monster.

Longlisted for the Man Booker 2016.


The Midnight WatchCover Image, Art Making

David Dyer
Penguin
Genre: Fiction
ISBN 9780143783466     
Paperback 2016
Price $AU 22.99 
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Based on the true story of the SS Californian, the ship that saw the Titanic's distress rockets and yet, unfathomably, did nothing. As the Titanic was sinking slowly in the wretchedly cold North Atlantic, she could see the lights of another ship on the horizon. She called for help by Morse lamp and the new Marconi telegraph machine, but there was no response. Why not? When the story of the disaster begins to emerge, it's a question that Boston American reporter John Steadman cannot let go. So begins his strange journey towards the truth.


Wild IslandCover Image, Art Making

Jennifer Livett
Allen & Unwin
Genre: Fiction
ISBN 9781760113834     
Trade Paperback 2016
Price $AU 29.99 
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This well-researched and dazzling novel ingeniously entwines Jane Eyre's iconic love story with Tasmania's Sir John Franklin's great tale of exploration and empire. A brilliant and historically accurate depiction of Van Diemen's Land society in the 1800s, as well as a vivid portrayal of the human cost of colonisation, Wild Island shows us that fiction and history are not so different after all.


Hillybilly Elegy
Cover Image, Jellyfish

J.D Vance
Harper Collins
Genre: Biography
ISBN 9780008220556     
Trade Paperback 2016
Price $AU 32.99
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J. D. Vance tells the true story of what a social, regional, and class decline feels like when you were born with it hung around your neck. The Vance family story begins hopefully in post-war America. J. D.'s grandparents were "dirt poor and in love," and moved north from Kentucky's Appalachia region to Ohio in the hopes of escaping the dreadful poverty around them. They raised a middle-class family, and eventually their grandchild (the author) would graduate from Yale Law School, a conventional marker of their success in achieving generational upward mobility. But as the family saga of Hillbilly Elegy plays out, we learn that this is only the short, superficial version. Vance's grandparents, aunt, uncle, sister, and, most of all, his mother, struggled profoundly with the demands of their new middle-class life, and were never able to fully escape the legacy of abuse, alcoholism, poverty, and trauma so characteristic of their part of America. Hillbilly Elegy is an urgent and troubling meditation on the loss of the American dream for a large segment of this country.


Do Not Say We Have Nothing
Cover Image, Art Making

Madeleine Thien
Granta Books
Genre: Fiction
ISBN 9781783782666     
Paperback 2016
Price $AU 27.99
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In Canada in 1990, ten-year-old Marie and her mother invite a guest into their home: a young woman who has fled China in the aftermath of the Tiananmen Square protests. Her name is Ai-Ming. As her relationship with Marie deepens, Ai-Ming tells the story of her family in revolutionary China, from the crowded teahouses in the first days of Chairman Mao's ascent to the Shanghai Conservatory in the 1960s and the events leading to the Beijing demonstrations of 1989. It is a history of revolutionary idealism, music, and silence, in which three musicians, the shy and brilliant composer Sparrow, the violin prodigy Zhuli, and the enigmatic pianist Kai struggle during China's relentless Cultural Revolution to remain loyal to one another and to the music they have devoted their lives to. Do Not Say We Have Nothing is a gripping evocation of the persuasive power of revolution and its effects on personal and national identity, and an unforgettable meditation on China today.

Shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize 2016.


The Summer that Melted Everything

Cover Image, Summer Melted

Tiffany McDaniel
Scribe
Genre: Fiction 
ISBN9781925321302
Trade Paperback 2016
Price $AU 29.99
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Fielding Bliss has never forgotten the summer of 1984: The year a heatwave scorched the small town of Breathed, Ohio. The year he became friends with the devil. When local prosecutor Autopsy Bliss publishes an invitation to the devil to come to the country town of Breathed, Ohio, nobody quite expects that he will turn up. They especially don't expect him to turn up as a tattered and bruised thirteen-year-old boy. The Blisses believe the boy, who calls himself Sal, is a runaway from a nearby farm town. Then, as a series of strange incidents implicate Sal, and riled by the feverish heat wave baking the town from the inside out, there are some around town who start to believe that maybe Sal is exactly who he claims to be. But whether he's a traumatised child or the devil incarnate, Sal is certainly one strange fruit: he talks in riddles, his uncanny knowledge and understanding reaches far outside the realm of a normal child, and ultimately his eerily affecting stories of Heaven, Hell, and earth will mesmerise and enflame the entire town. 


The Last Painting of Sara de VosCover Image, Last Painting

Dominic Smith
Allen & Unwin
Genre: Fiction
ISBN 9781743439951
Trade Paperback 2016
Price $AU 32.99
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Australian writer Dominic Smith brilliantly bridges the historical and the contemporary, tracking a collision course between a rare landscape by a female Dutch painter of the Golden Age, an inheritor of the work in 1950s Manhattan, and a celebrated Australian art historian who painted a forgery of it in her youth. In 1631, Sara de Vos is admitted to the Guild of St. Luke in Holland as a master painter, the first woman to be so honoured. Three hundred years later, only one work attributed to de Vos is known to remain - a haunting winter scene, which hangs over the Manhattan bed of a wealthy descendant of the original owner. An Australian grad student, Ellie Shipley, struggling to stay afloat in New York, agrees to paint a forgery of the landscape, a decision that will haunt her. Because now, half a century later, she's curating an exhibition of female Dutch painters, and both versions threaten to arrive. As the three threads intersect with increasing and exquisite suspense, The Last Painting of Sara de Vos mesmerises while it grapples with the demands of the artistic life, showing how the deceits of the past can forge the present.

Winner of the Indies Award for Fiction 2017.


The Guest CatCover Image, Last Painting

Takashi Hiraide
Picador
Genre: Fiction
ISBN 9781447279402
Paperback 2014
Price $AU 19.99
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A couple in their thirties live in a small rented cottage in a quiet part of Tokyo. They work at home as freelance writers. One day a cat invites itself into their small kitchen. She is a beautiful creature. She leaves, but the next day comes again, and then again and again. New, small joys accompany the cat; the days have more light and colour. Life suddenly seems to have more promise for the husband and wife; they go walking together, talk and share stories of the cat and its little ways, play in the nearby Garden. But then something happens that will change everything again. The Guest Cat is an exceptionally moving and beautiful novel and was the winner of Japan's Kiyama Shohei Literary Award, and was a bestseller in France and America.  This is great read for nature lovers and those interested in the mind of the writer.


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