Staff Recommended Reads

BOOKMARK BOOK OF THE YEAR 2020!'A girl's own adventure...This is Rachel Joyce's best book yet ...Exciting, moving and full of unexpected turns.' THE TIMES 'Brilliant and elegant and wise...powerful and moving...I can't recommend it enough.' JOANNA CANNON'A beautiful portrayal of female friendship in all its frailties, contradictions and strengths.' RAYNOR WINN'The perfect escape novel for our troubled times.' PATRICK GALE____________________It is 1950. In a devastating moment of clarity, Margery Benson abandons her dead-end job and advertises for an assistant to accompany her on an expedition. She is going to travel to the other side of the world to search for a beetle that may or may not exist. Enid Pretty, in her unlikely pink travel suit, is not the companion Margery had in mind. And yet together they will be drawn into an adventure that will exceed every expectation. They will risk everything, break all the rules, and at the top of a red mountain, discover their best selves.This is a story that is less about what can be found than the belief it might be found; it is an intoxicating adventure story but it is also about what it means to be a woman and a tender exploration of a friendship that defies all boundaries.

Robber Girl doesn't have a name. Or a home. But she does have a dagger. And she has Gentleman Jack. Together, they are wild.Gentleman Jack has two tasks and he needs Robber Girl with him to complete them. But when a heist to steal back Gentleman Jack's gold goes wrong, Robber Girl is trapped. Instead of sleeping out in the ravine with cliffs and caves and a river, she must stay in a cottage with keys and doorknobs and a dollhouse. A cottage that threatens to tame her.Robber Girl waits for the right moment to start her new task: she will break Gentleman Jack out of jail. But the longer Robber Girl waits, the more the cottage starts to feel like home. Torn between loyalty to Gentleman Jack and the family who have taken her in, between fighting and trusting, between being wild and being tame, Robber Girl must unravel who she was and who she is now. But when you’re a mystery even to yourself, discovering who you are might be the hardest task of them all.

This is a weirdly beautiful book.' David Walsh founder and curator, MONA 'Life beats down and crushes the soul, and art reminds you that you have one.' Stella Adler 'Art will wake you up. Art will break your heart. There will be glorious days. If you want eternity you must be fearless.' From The Museum of Modern Love She watched as the final hours of The Artist is Present passed by, sitter after sitter in a gaze with the woman across the table. Jane felt she had witnessed a thing of inexplicable beauty among humans who had been drawn to this art and had found the reflection of a great mystery. What are we? How should we live? If this was a dream, then he wanted to know when it would end. Maybe it would end if he went to see Lydia. But it was the one thing he was not allowed to do. Arky Swann 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.

With her penetrating insight into the hearts and minds of real people, Jodi Picoult's My Sister's Keeper examines what it means to be a good parent, a good sister, a good person, and what happens when emotions meet with scientific advances. Now a major film. Anna is not sick, but she might as well be. By age thirteen, she has undergone countless surgeries, transfusions and shots so that her older sister, Kate, can somehow fight the leukemia that has plagued her since childhood. Anna was conceived as a bone marrow match for Kate a life and a role that she has never questioned until now. Like most teenagers, Anna is beginning to ask herself who she truly is. But unlike most teenagers, she has always been defined in terms of her sister - and so Anna makes a decision that for most would be unthinkable a decision that will tear her family apart and have perhaps fatal consequences for the sister she loves. Told from multiple points of view, My Sister's Keeper examines what it means to be a good parent, a good sister, a good person. Is it morally correct to do whatever it takes to save a child's life . . . even if that means infringing upon the rights of another? Should you follow your own heart, or let others lead you?

She hears her own thick voice deep inside her ears when she says, ‘I need to know where I am.’ The man stands there, tall and narrow, hand still on the doorknob, surprised. He says, almost in sympathy, ‘Oh, sweetie. You need to know what you are.’Two women awaken from a drugged sleep to find themselves imprisoned in a broken-down property in the middle of nowhere. Strangers to each other, they have no idea where they are or how they came to be there with eight other girls, forced to wear strange uniforms, their heads shaved, guarded by two inept yet vicious armed jailers and a 'nurse'.The girls all have something in common, but what is it? What crime has brought them here from the city? Who is the mysterious security company responsible for this desolate place with its brutal rules, its total isolation from the contemporary world? Doing hard labour under a sweltering sun, the prisoners soon learn what links them: in each girl's past is a sexual scandal with a powerful man. They pray for rescue—but when the food starts running out it becomes clear that the jailers have also become the jailed. The girls can only rescue themselves.With extraordinary echoes of ‘The Handmaid's Tale’ and ‘Lord of the Flies’, ‘The Natural Way of Things’ is a compulsively readable, scarifying and deeply moving contemporary novel. It confirms Charlotte Wood's position as one of our most thoughtful, provocative and fearless truth-tellers, as she unflinchingly reveals us and our world to ourselves.

Although there are acrobats, fortune-tellers and contortionists, the Circus of Dreams is no conventional spectacle. Some tents contain clouds, some ice. The circus seems almost to cast a spell over its aficionados, who call themselves the rêveurs - the dreamers. At the heart of the story is the tangled relationship between two young magicians, Celia, the enchanter's daughter, and Marco, the sorcerer's apprentice. At the behest of their shadowy masters, they find themselves locked in a deadly contest, forced to test the very limits of the imagination, and of their love...A fabulous, fin-de-siècle feast for the senses and a life-affirming love story, The Night Circus is a captivating novel that will make the real world seem fantastical and a fantasy world real.The Starless Sea, the magical second novel from the author of the The Night Circus, is available now.

"Where have I come from? From the land of rivers, the land of waterfalls, the land of ancient chants, the land of mountains. In 2013, Kurdish journalist Behrouz Boochani was illegally detained on Manus Island. He has been there ever since. People would run to the mountains to escape the warplanes and found asylum within their chestnut forests. This book is the result. Laboriously tapped out on a mobile phone and translated from the Farsi. It is a voice of witness, an act of survival. A lyric first-hand account. A cry of resistance. A vivid portrait through five years of incarceration and exile. Do Kurds have any friends other than the mountains?"--Publisher's summary.

SOME GIRLS ARE BORN TO BE LOVED, SOME ARE BORN TO BE USEFUL, AND SOME ARE BORN TO BE BAD ... Indulged and wealthy Kat Fitzhubert is sent to a colony across the world, in an arranged marriage. Lady Viola Montefiore is the dark-skinned changeling of a ducal family, kept hidden and then shipped away. Titania Boot is as broad as a carthorse, and as useful. On the long sea voyage from their homeland of England, these three women are fast bonded in an unlikely friendship. In the turmoil of 1850s Australia - which has reinvented itself from convict colony to a land of gold rushes and illusive riches - one woman forges a business empire, while another turns to illegal brewery, working alongside a bushranger as the valleys around her are destroyed. The third vanishes on her wedding day, in a scandal that will intrigue and mystify Sydney's polite society and beyond. In this magnificent and broad-sweeping saga, award-winning author Jackie French defies the myth of colonial women as merely wives, servants, petty thieves or whores. Instead, in this masterful storyteller's hands, these three women will be arbiters of a destiny far richer than the bewitching glitter and lure of gold.

The right words at the right moment can be priceless. Bringing the hugely beloved "Poetry Pharmacy" trilogy to completion, these poetic prescriptions and wise words of advice offer comfort and joy for all. Here are pages to return to time and again - a place for calm contemplation, and that vital recognition: although the world may change, others have felt as I now feel.

Every year, Blue Sargent stands next to her clairvoyant mother as the soon-to-be dead walk past. Blue herself never sees them-not until this year, when a boy emerges from the dark and speaks directly to her. His name is Gansey and Blue soon discovers that he is a rich student at Aglionby, the local private school. Blue has a policy of staying away from Aglionby boys. Known as Raven Boys, they can only mean trouble. But Blue is drawn to Gansey, in a way she can't entirely explain. He has it all-family money, good looks, devoted friends-but he's looking for much more than that. He is on a quest that has encompassed three other Raven Boys.