Books Archive

Think Twice

By Harlan Coben

September 30, 2024

How can a man who’s already dead be wanted for murder?

This is the question sports agent Myron Bolitar asks himself when two FBI agents visit him in New York.

The man they are looking for is Myron’s former client and rival, Greg Downing. Greg’s DNA has been found at the scene of a high profile double-murder, and he is now the FBI’s main suspect.

But Greg died three years previously, Myron says. He went to his funeral and gave the eulogy.

The FBI are disbelieving, and Myron knows he has to find some answers – and quickly.

Could Greg Downing still be alive?

The more Myron and his close friend Win dig into what really happened, the more dangerous their world becomes . .

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Intermezzo

By Sally Rooney

September 30, 2024

Aside from the fact that they are brothers, Peter and Ivan Koubek seem to have little in common.

Peter is a Dublin lawyer in his thirties – successful, competent and apparently unassailable. But in the wake of their father’s death, he’s medicating himself to sleep and struggling to manage his relationships with two very different women – his enduring first love Sylvia, and Naomi, a college student for whom life is one long joke.

Ivan is a twenty-two-year-old competitive chess player. He has always seen himself as socially awkward, a loner, the antithesis of his glib elder brother. Now, in the early weeks of his bereavement, Ivan meets Margaret, an older woman emerging from her own turbulent past, and their lives become rapidly and intensely intertwined.

For two grieving brothers and the people they love, this is a new interlude – a period of desire, despair and possibility – a chance to find out how much one life might hold inside itself without breaking.

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Doppel-ganger

By Naomi Klein

September 5, 2024

When Naomi Klein discovered that a woman who shared her first name, but had radically different, harmful views, was getting chronically mistaken for her, it seemed too ridiculous to take seriously. Then suddenly it wasn’t. She started to find herself grappling with a distorted sense of reality, becoming obsessed with reading the threats on social media, the endlessly scrolling insults from the followers of her doppelganger. Why had her shadowy other gone down such an extreme path? Why was identity – all we have to meet the world – so unstable?

To find out, Klein decided to follow her double into a bizarre, uncanny mirror world: one of conspiracy theories, anti-vaxxers and demagogue hucksters, where soft-focus wellness influencers make common cause with fire-breathing far right propagandists (all in the name of protecting ‘the children’). In doing so, she lifts the lid on our own culture during this surreal moment in history, as we turn ourselves into polished virtual brands, publicly shame our enemies, watch as deep fakes proliferate and whole nations flip from democracy to something far more sinister.

This is a book for our age and for all of us; a deadly serious dark comedy which invites us to view our reflections in the looking glass. It’s for anyone who has lost hours down an internet rabbit hole, who wonders why our politics has become so fatally warped, and who wants a way out of our collective vertigo and back to fighting for what really matters.

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This Is Why We Can’t Have Nice Things

By Naomi Wood

September 5, 2024

In my life, I had always been a good woman; controlling what it was that I wanted. But recently, I had started to notice my bad energy, and I began to follow it, wondering where it would take me . . .

A woman has an unexpected outburst at a corporate therapy session for working mothers. A couple find some long-overdue time to rekindle their relationship and make an ill-advised home movie. A pregnant film director plots revenge on the actress who betrayed her. An ex-wife deliberately causes conflict at her ex-husband’s wedding.

This Is Why We Can’t Have Nice Things illuminates the lives of malicious, subversive, and untamed women. Exploring failed sisterhood, dubious parenting, and the dark side of modern love, this powerful and funny collection exposes how society wants women to behave, and shows what happens when they refuse.

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Safe Enough

By Lee Child

September 5, 2024

A drug-dealing hit man unburdens his fears to a stranger. An overlooked rookie cop is assigned to the department’s file room. A ruthless killer only kills bad guys. A methodical bodyguard quits his job when he’s outsmarted. A military mission is planned to perfection. . .

Meticulously plotted and utterly compelling, these are intimate portraits of humanity at its best and worst. Each story is entirely distinct. And with their economical prose and unexpected twists, each could only have been written by the creator of Jack Reacher.

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The Covenant of Water

By Abraham Verghese

September 5, 2024

Spanning the years 1900 to 1977, The Covenant of Water follows a family in southern India that suffers a peculiar affliction: in every generation, at least one person dies by drowning – and in Kerala, water is everywhere.

At the turn of the century a twelve-year-old girl, grieving the death of her father, is sent by boat to her wedding, where she will meet her forty-year-old husband for the first time. From this poignant beginning, the young girl and future matriarch – known as Big Ammachi – will witness unthinkable changes over the span of her extraordinary life, full of joy and triumph as well as hardship and loss, her faith and love the only constants.

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Whaea Blue

By Talia Marshall

September 5, 2024

Polly and Wiki and all the other kuia ride on the roof of Kerry’s Toyota Corona with its navy blistered bonnet . . . They do this for all the moko; they are everywhere and roam inside us as they keep weaving the net and it’s no small thing that only a few slip through.

Time and whakapapa slowly unravel as Talia Marshall weaves her way across Aotearoa in a roster of decaying European cars. Along the way she will meet her father, pick up a ghost, transform into a wharenui, and make cocktail hour with Ans Westra.

Men will come – Roman, Ben, Isaac – and some go. Others linger. And it is these men – her father, Paul, and grandfathers Mugwi Macdonald and Jim; her tīpuna Nicola Sciascia, tohunga Kipa Hemi Whiro, Kupe himself – who she observes as she moves backwards into the future. With her ancestor Tūtepourangi she relives Te Rauparaha’s bloody legacy, and attempts and fails to write her great historical novel.

But it is her wāhine, past and present, who carry her, even as the ground behind her smoulders.

Tempestuous and haunting, Whaea Blue is a tribute to collective memory, the elasticity of self, and the women we travel through. It is a karanga to and from the abyss. It is a journey to peace.

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Death at the Sign of the Rook

By Kate Atkinson

September 5, 2024

Ex-detective Jackson Brodie is staving off a bad case of midlife malaise when he is called to a sleepy Yorkshire town, and the seemingly tedious matter of a stolen painting. But one theft leads to another, including the disappearance of a valuable Turner from Burton Makepeace, home to Lady Milton and her family. Once a magnificent country house, Burton Makepeace has now partially been converted into a hotel, hosting Murder Mystery weekends.

As paying guests, a vicar, an ex-army officer, impecunious aristocrats, and old friends converge, we are treated a fiendishly clever mystery; one that pays homage to the masters of the genre—from Agatha Christie to Dorothy Sayers.

Brilliantly inventive, with all of Atkinson’s signature wit, wordplay and narrative brio, Death at the Sign of the Rook may be Jackson Brodie’s most outrageous and memorable case yet.

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