Books

Bertie Plays the BluesBy Alexander McCall Smith, NewSouthBooks, $29.95 If Precious Ramotswe of the No. 1 Ladies’ Detective Agency is the Alexander McCall Smith character I most admire, six-year-old Bertie Pollack is the one I most want to help. The latest of McCall Smith’s popular Scotland Street novels finally gives us a sliver of hope […]

The Cut By George Pelecanos, Orion, $32.99 Stephen King and Barack Obama are just two of George Pelecanos’ legion of fans. If you haven’t read him before, you might still know his work from the cult television hit The Wire — a gritty, understated, crime drama set in the gang-ridden streets of Baltimore. The Cut […]

The Sense Of An Ending By Julian Barnes, Random House, $29.95. Julian Barnes’ books seem to get shorter as he ages, but that doesn’t mean they’re any less engrossing. This one, more of a novella than a full-blown novel, has been long-listed for the Booker Prize and finds the author back in a contemplative mood. […]

The Doll: Short StoriesBy Daphne Du Maurier, Virago, $24.99. Published posthumously, these 13 forgotten short stories — penned by famed Jamaica Inn author Daphne Du Maurier, most of them when she was in her 20s — make for riveting, if somewhat shocking reading. The eponymousThe Dollis the scene-stealer: a macabre tension-filled tale of a man […]

You’ll Be Sorry When I’m Dead by Marieke Hardy, Allen & Unwin, $29.99. A threesome with a prostitute is a provocative way to open this brilliant new novel by Melbourne writer Marieke Hardy. Yet it is the chapters on her mundane life experiences that sparkle. Hardy quickly tires of prostitutes and dumps her boyfriend. From […]

The Briny CafeBy Susan Duncan, Bantam Australia, $32.95. They say the best fiction writers draw from experience. So when high-flying magazine editor Susan Duncan left the hustle of Sydney to live in a house on Pittwater — accessible only by boat and built for Dorothea Mackellar in 1925 – it’s not much of a stretch […]

Tasting India By Christine Manfield, Lantern, $89.95. Sydney chef and restaurateur Christine Manfield has a special place in her heart for India. “On each and every visit, I surrender myself to the procession of life before me, as India begins to pulsate through my veins,” she says. This exceptional, lavish book is a visual and […]

Cain by José Saramago, Harvill Secker, $29.95. You know that Woody Allen film Zelig, about a man who inexplicably bobs up in the background at key moments of history? Well, that’s what Cain — the murderous brother of Abel in the Bible — does in this last satirical novel by Nobel laureate Jose Saramago. And […]

The Quarry by Johan Theorin, Doubleday, $32.95. The Swedish crime wave rolls on. The interesting thing is how good these books are; turns out there was a talented crowd banked up behind Stieg Larsson. And within the genre is emerging a sub-genre centred on remote islands; the winter locks them off, bad things happen there. […]

This is Di Morrissey’s 20th book, arriving 20 years after she published her first — though she’ll be selling a lot more copies, having spent those years building a strong and supportive base of readers. As the title suggests, The Opal Desert is set in and around Australia’s remote opal fields, in a small imaginary […]