These are the books by Australian female authors on my “to read” list for 2016 … with the publisher’s blurbs which have convinced me they are worth reading!
The Dry
- by Jane Harper
This book won the Victorian Premier’s Literary Award for an Unpublished Manuscript It’s Jane’s first novel with rights sold to over twenty territories.
Luke Hadler turns a gun on his wife and child, then himself. The farming community of Kiewarra is facing life and death choices daily. If one of their own broke under the strain, well …
When Federal Police investigator Aaron Falk returns to Kiewarra for the funerals, he is loath to confront the people who rejected him twenty years earlier. But when his investigative skills are called on, the facts of the Hadler case start to make him doubt this murder-suicide charge.
Promise
by Sarah Armstrong
This is Sarah’s third novel. Her first Salt Rain was shortlisted for the Miles Franklin Award.
When a new family moves in next door, it takes Anna just two days to realise something is very wrong. She can hear their five-year-old daughter Charlie crying, then sees injuries on the little girl which cannot be ignored. Anna reports the family to the police and social services but when no one comes to Charlie’s aid, Anna understands that she is alone with her fears for the child’s life.
So when Charlie comes to her door asking for help, the only thing Anna can think to do is take the girl and run.
Raising delicate but deeply felt questions about our individual responsibility for the children around us, Promise is a novel that obliges the reader to ask: if Charlie were my neighbour, what would I do?
Beautiful Failures
by Lucy Clark
I want to tell you a story about my daughter, my beautiful failure. Every day of her high school life was a struggle. She woke up in the morning and the thought of going to school was like an enormous mountain to climb.
When Lucy Clark’s daughter graduated from school a ‘failure’, she started asking questions about the way we measure success. Why is there so much pressure on kids today? Where does it come from? Most importantly, as we seem to be in the grip of an epidemic of anxiety, how can we reduce that pressure?
Beautiful Failures explores, through personal experience and journalistic investigation, a broken education system that fails too many kids and puts terrible pressure on all kids, including those who ‘succeed’. It challenges accepted wisdoms about schooling, calls on parents to examine their own expectations, and questions the purpose of education, and indeed the purpose of childhood.
Use Your Words – A Myth-Busting, No-Fear Approach to Writing
by Catherine Deveny
Want to write? Got a memoir, novel, screenplay or blog in your back drawer? Need to get ‘unstuck’? This is the magic pill you’ve been looking for.
In Use Your Words writer and comedian Catherine Deveny reveals the secrets that have made her ‘Gunnas’ Writing Masterclasses sell-out successes around the country. With humour and passion, she explains the struggles all writers face and reveals how to overcome them.
Whether you’re already published or just starting out, writing for others or purely for self-expression, Use Your Words has the tips, tricks, techniques and honest truths to get you writing. You’ll learn how creativity is a like a vending machine, how writing is like a magnet and how not to die with your light inside you.
Wait no longer – smash through procrastination and fear and get those words on the page.
Speaking Out: A 21st-Century Handbook for Women and Girls
A short, accessible and practical handbook for women on speaking out safely and confidently.
Worldwide, less than one out of every four people we hear from or about in the media is female and men outnumber women in parliament by four to one. If half of humanity’s experiences, perspectives and possible solutions to world problems are under-represented, or entirely unheard, all of us lose out.
Truly, Madly, Guiltyby Liane MoriartyIF ONLY THEY’D SAID NO…Clementine is haunted by regret. It was just a barbeque. They didn’t even know their hosts that well, they were friends of friends. They could so easily have said no.But she and her husband Sam said yes, and now they can never change what they did and didn’t do that Sunday afternoon.
Six responsible adults. Three cute kids. One playful dog. It’s an ordinary weekend in the suburbs. What could possibly go wrong?
Marriage, sex, parenthood and friendship: Liane Moriarty takes these elements of our lives and shows us how guilt can expose the fault lines in any relationship, and it is not until we appreciate the fragility of life that we can truly value what we have.
The One Who Got Away
by Caroline Overington
The top ten bestseller: a compulsive and startling psychological thriller for fans of Girl on a Train and Gone Girl. Loren Wynne-Estes appears to have it all: she’s the girl from the wrong side of the tracks who’s landed a handsome husband, a stunning home, a fleet of shiny cars and two beautiful daughters … Then one day a fellow parent taps Loren on the shoulder outside the grand school gate, hands her a note … and suddenly everything’s at stake. Loren’s Facebook-perfect marriage is spectacularly exposed – revealing an underbelly of lies and betrayal. What is uncovered will scandalise a small town, destroy lives and leave a family divided. But who is to be believed and who is to blame? Will the right person be brought to justice or is there one who got away?
These ones are to be published in the next couple of months.
Barbed Wire and Cherry Blossoms
by Anita Heiss
Over 1000 Japanese soldiers break out of the No.12 Prisoner of War compound on the fringes of Cowra. In the carnage, hundreds are killed, many are recaptured, and some take their own lives rather than suffer the humiliation of ongoing defeat.
But one soldier, Hiroshi, manages to escape.
At nearby Erambie Station, an Aboriginal mission, Banjo Williams, father of five and proud man of his community, discovers Hiroshi, distraught and on the run. Unlike most of the townsfolk who dislike and distrust the Japanese, the people of Erambie choose compassion and offer Hiroshi refuge. Mary, Banjo’s daughter, is intrigued by the softly spoken stranger, and charged with his care.
For the community, life at Erambie is one of restriction and exclusion – living under Acts of Protection and Assimilation, and always under the ruthless eye of the mission Manager. On top of wartime hardships, families live without basic rights.
Love blossoms between Mary and Hiroshi, and they each dream of a future together. But how long can Hiroshi be hidden safely and their bond kept a secret?
Tell The Truth Shame The Devil
by Melina Marchetta
A cracking fusion of suspense and heart-rending drama from one of Australia’s most loved writers.
Chief Inspector Bish Ortley of the London Met, divorced and still grieving the death of his son, has been drowning his anger in Scotch. Something has to give, and he’s no sooner suspended from the force than a busload of British students is subject to a deadly bomb attack across the Channel. Bish’s daughter is one of those on board.
Also on the bus is Violette LeBrac. Raised in Australia, Violette has a troubled background. Thirteen years ago her grandfather bombed a London supermarket, killing dozens of people. Her mother, Noor, is serving a life sentence in connection with the incident. But before Violette’s part in the French tragedy can be established she disappears.
Bish, who was involved in Noor LeBrac’s arrest, is now compelled to question everything that happened back then. And the more he delves into the lives of the family he helped put away, the more he realises that truth wears many colours.
With its cast of unforgettable characters, social insight and wry wit, Tell the Truth, Shame the Devil is an irresistible novel about human identity, lost children and the nature of real love.
Fearless
by Fiona Higgins
Fiona Higgins is the author of Fearless, Wife on the Run, The Mothers’ Group and Love in the Age of Drought. After several years of living in Indonesia, she recently relocated to Sydney
Six strangers from across the world converge on the tropical island of Bali to attend a personal development course designed to help them face their fears. Their backgrounds are as diverse as their fears—which range from flying, public speaking and heights, through to intimacy, failure and death. Friendships and even romance blossoms as the participants are put through a series of challenges which are unusual, confronting and sometimes hilarious. A week of fun in the sun suddenly morphs into something far more serious, however, when the unthinkable happens—a disaster that puts the group in deadly danger and tests the individual courage of every member.
What books are you reading in 2016?
Thanks Janine, there’s a couple there I can’t wait to read!
Hi Janine I’m reading Truely Madly Guilty, Brilliant, I love Liane Moriarty, favourite Aussie Author! I’d lend you my copy but Phil and my sister are next in line!!! I’m keen to read Beautiful Failures, sounds interesting….
Looks like a great selection Janine. Are you joining in the Australian Women Writers Challenge? I’ve got Anita Heiss’s book on my to-be-read list too, & now Catherine Deveney’s, it looks like just what I need right now. I’ve also just read Mullumbimby, by Melissa Lucashenko – definitely recommended, if you get through all these in a hurry. Happy reading.
I haven’t signed up for the challenge but I might if I get a few more read quickly. I’ll have to check out Mullumbimby.
The challenge is just a bit of fun to keep us all supporting Aussie women writers, which you are clearly doing in a big way 🙂