The Two Kinds of Decay by Sarah Manguso was named by Readings Bookshops in Melbourne as one of their Best Books for 2008. In selecting it, Vicky Booth writes that while ‘Sarah Manguso’s style is spare and unsentimental, she communicates the intensely personal experience of nine years battling a rare blood disease with an immediacy that is powerful and moving.’
Beneath Our Armour is unique. This sequence of portrait poems covers vast tracts of history, geography, and personae in a way that is at once intimate and epic.
Set in contemporary India, Big Girl Now follows the story of a young woman who moves from a small hill town to Bangalore. This is one of the first Indian novels to explore the situation of a young girl in a big city and to do so in a way that balances cynicism with wit, warmth with uncertainty, existential doubts with the pulls of the everyday world.
Tony Birch’s first collection of stories, Shadowboxing, was shortlisted for the Queensland Premier’s Literary Awards in 2006 and was voted top five in a State Library of Victoria poll of readers’ all-time favorite books set in Victoria.
A father teaches his daughter how to break whiskey bottles. A woman looks for an old lover in a satellite photograph. A man finds the voice of his dead wife on an unlabelled cassette tape. A blind girl dreams about the taste of the moon.
Set against the backdrop of a small Indian hill town called Shillong, this title is a beautiful lyrical novel about three lives in limbo. A compelling debut by a major new talent, will appeal to readers of Arundhati Roy.