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 […]

Snowdrops by A.D. Miller, Atlantic, $19.99. In Moscow, a snowdrop is not a flower but a slang term for a corpse which “blooms” during spring when the snow melts and exposes the body beneath. A useful way to conceal a murder … This literary thriller starts as thirtysomething expatriate lawyer Nick Platt discovers his own […]

Rules of Civility by Amor Towles, Sceptre, $29.99. Take The Great Gatsby, throw in a little Breakfast At Tiffany’s, and mix it up with a whole lot of attitude in a cocktail shaker and you’ve got Rules of Civility, a sophisticated coming of age story set in 1938 Manhattan. Katey Kontent is a typist in […]

I Am Half Sick of Shadows by Alan Bradley, Orion, $32.99. Flavia de Luce may be a delightful innocent, but she’s well acquainted with murder and easy in its company. In her well-stocked chemistry laboratory in a wing of her crumbling family estate, neglected Flavia explores the fascinating world of poisons, while her older sisters […]