Estore 25

Enticed by advertisements for a newly restored palatial hotel and filled with visions of a life of leisure, and mango juice in their gin, a group of very different people leave England to begin a new life in India. On arrival they are dismayed. But, as they soon discover, life and love can begin again, even in the most unexpected circumstances.

Title: Best Exotic Marigold Hotel
Author: MOGGACH DEBORAH
Format: Paperback
Publishing status: Active
Publication date: 16/02/2012
Price: $27.00
RRP: $27.00
Imprint: Vintage
Publisher: Vintage
ISBN: 9780099572022

When a bird flies into a window in Spring Green, Wisconsin, sisters Milly and Twiss get a visit. Twiss listens to the birds' heartbeats, assessing what she can fix and what she can't, while Milly listens to the heartaches of the people who've brought them. These spinster sisters have spent their lives nursing people and birds back to health. But back in the summer of 1947, Milly and Twiss knew nothing about trying to mend what had been accidentally broken. Milly was known as a great beauty with emerald eyes and Twiss was a brazen wild child who never wore a dress or did what she was told. That was the summer their golf pro father got into an accident that cost him both his swing and his charm, and their mother, the daughter of a wealthy jeweler, finally admitted their hardscrabble lives wouldn't change. It was the summer their priest, Father Rice, announced that God didn't exist and ran off to Mexico, and a boy named Asa finally caught Milly's eye. And, most unforgettably, it was the summer their cousin Bett came down from a town called Deadwater and changed the course of their lives forever. Rebecca Rasmussen's masterfully written debut novel is full of hope and beauty, heartbreak and sacrifice, love and the power of sisterhood, and offers wonderful surprises at every turn.

Title: Bird Sisters
Author: RASMUSSEN REBECCA
Format: Paperback
Publishing status: Active
Publication date: 03/02/2012
Price: $29.00
RRP: $29.00
Imprint: Broadway Publications
ISBN: 9780307717979

Julie Otsuka's long awaited follow-up to When the Emperor Was Divine is a tour de force of economy and precision, a novel that tells the story of a group of young women brought over from Japan to San Francisco as picture brides nearly a century ago.

In eight incantatory sections, The Buddha in the Attic traces their extraordinary lives, from their arduous journey by boat, where the girls exchange photographs of their husbands, imagining uncertain futures in an unknown land; to their arrival in San Francisco and their tremulous first nights as new wives; to their backbreaking work picking fruit in the fields and scrubbing the floors of white women in their homes; to their struggles to master a new language and a new culture; to their experiences in childbirth, and then as mothers, raising children who will ultimately reject their heritage and their history; to the deracinating arrival of war.

In language that has the force and the fury of poetry, Julie Otsuka has written a singularly spellbinding novel about the American dream.

Title: Buddha in the Attic
Author: OTSUKA JULIE
Format: Hardback
Publishing status: Active
Publication date: 22/02/2012
Price: $37.00
RRP: $37.00
Imprint: Fig Tree
ISBN: 9781905490875

Pepys Road: an ordinary street in the Capital. Each house has seen its fair share of first steps and last breaths, and plenty of laughter in between. Today, through each letterbox along this ordinary street drops a card with a simple message: We Want What You Have. At forty, Roger Yount is blessed with an expensively groomed wife, two small sons and a powerful job in the City. An annual bonus of a million might seem excessive, but with second homes and nannies to maintain, he's not sure he can get by without it. Elsewhere in the Capital, Zbigniew has come from Warsaw to indulge the super-rich in their interior decoration whims. Freddy Kano, teenage football sensation, has left a two-room shack in Senegal to follow his dream. Traffic warden Quentina has exchanged the violence of the police in Zimbabwe for the violence of the enraged middle classes. For them all, this city offers the chance of a different kind of life. "Capital" is a post-crash state-of-the nation novel told with compassion and humour, featuring a cast of characters that you will be sad to leave behind.

Title: Capital
Author: LANCHESTER JOHN
Format: Trade Paperback
Publishing status: Active
Publication date: 01/03/2012
Price: $37.00
RRP: $37.00
Imprint: Faber & Faber
Publisher: Faber and Faber
ISBN: 9780571234615

Melbourne, 1959. An 11-year-old boy witnesses a murder as he spies through the window of a strange house. God, whom he no longer counts as a friend, obviously has a pretty screwed-up sense of humour: just one year before, the boy had looked on helplessly as his twin brother, Tom, suffered a violent death. Now, having been seen by the angry murderer, he is a kid on the run. With only a shady grandfather, a professional standover man and an incongruous local couple as adult mentors, he takes refuge in the dark drains and grimy tunnels beneath the city, transforming himself into a series of superheroes and creating a rather unreliable map to plot out places where he is unlikely to cross paths with the bogeyman. A bold, captivating and outrageously funny novel about a boy who refuses to give in and the numerous shifty, dodgy and downright malicious bastards he has to contend with on his grand adventure of loss and discovery, The Cartographer is an astounding, fresh and unforgettably poignant novel you'd be a mug to miss!

Title: Cartographer
Author: TWOHIG PETER
Year: 1202
Format: Trade Paperback
Publishing status: Active
Publication date: 01/02/2012
Price: $40.00
RRP: $40.00
Imprint: Fourth Estate
Publisher: HarperCollins Publishers (Aust
ISBN: 9780732293161

On a summer's day in 1922 Cora Carlisle boards a train from Wichita, Kansas, to New York City, leaving behind a marriage that's not as perfect as it seems and a past that she buried long ago. She is charged with the care of a stunning young girl with a jet-black fringe and eyes wild and wise beyond her fifteen years. This girl is hungry for stardom and Cora for something she doesn't yet know. Cora will be many things in her lifetime - an orphan, a mother, a wife, a mistress - but in New York she is a chaperone and her life is about to change. It is here under the bright lights of Broadway, in a time when prohibition reigns and speakeasies with their forbidden whispers behind closed doors thrive, that Cora finds what she has been searching for. It is here, in a time when illicit thrills and daring glamour sizzle beneath the laws of propriety that her life truly begins. It is here that Cora and her charge, Louise Brooks, take their first steps towards their dreams.

Title: Chaperone
Author: MORIARTY LAURA
Year: 2012
Format: Trade Paperback
Publishing status: Active
Publication date: 26/04/2012
Price: $35.00
RRP: $35.00
Imprint: Penguin Books
Publisher: Penguin Books Ltd
ISBN: 9780718159955

Dorothy Forrest is immersed in the sensory world around her; she lives in the flickering moment. From the age of seven, when her odd, disenfranchised family moves from New York City to the wide skies of Auckland, to the very end of her life, this is her great gift and possible misfortune. Through the wilderness of a commune, to falling in love, to early marriage and motherhood, from the glorious anguish of parenting to the loss of everything worked for and the unexpected return of love, Dorothy is swept along by time. Her family looms and recedes; revelations come to light; death changes everything, but somehow life remains as potent as it ever was, and the joy in just being won't let her go. In a narrative that shifts and moves, growing as wild as the characters, The Forrests is an extraordinary literary achievement. A novel that sings with colour and memory, it speaks of family and time, dysfunction, ageing and loneliness, about heat, youth, and how life can change if 'you're lucky enough to be around for it'.

Title: Forrests
Author: PERKINS EMILY
Format: Trade Paperback
Publishing status: Active
Publication date: 24/05/2012
Price: $37.00
RRP: $37.00
Imprint: Bloomsbury
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing PLC
ISBN: 9781408809235

Two men have been enlisted to kill the head of the Gestapo. This is Operation Anthropoid, Prague, 1942: two Czechoslovakian parachutists sent on a daring mission by London to assassinate Reinhard Heydrich - chief of the Nazi secret services, 'the hangman of Prague', 'the blond beast', 'the most dangerous man in the Third Reich'. His boss is Heinrich Himmler but everyone in the SS says 'Himmler's brain is called Heydrich', which in German spells "HHhH". All the characters in "HHhH" are real. All the events depicted are true. But alongside the nerve-shredding preparations for the attack runs another story: when you are a novelist writing about real people, how do you resist the temptation to make things up? "HHhH" is a panorama of the Third Reich told through the life of one outstandingly brutal man, a story of unbearable heroism and loyalty, revenge and betrayal. It is improbably entertaining and electrifyingly modern, a moving and shattering work of fiction.

Title: HHhH
Author: BINET LAURENT
Format: Paperback
Publishing status: Active
Publication date: 03/05/2012
Price: $35.00
RRP: $35.00
Imprint: Harvill Press
Publisher: Vintage
ISBN: 9781846554803

A compelling novel of desire, secrecy, and sexual identity, "In One Person" is a story of unfulfilled love - tormented, funny, and affecting - and an impassioned embrace of our sexual differences. Billy, the bisexual narrator and main character of "In One Person", tells the tragicomic story (lasting more than half a century) of his life as a "sexual suspect", a phrase first used by John Irving in 1978 - in his landmark novel of "terminal cases", "The World According to Garp". His most political novel since "The Cider House Rules" and "A Prayer for Owen Meany", John Irving's "In One Person" is a poignant tribute to Billy's friends and lovers - a theatrical cast of characters who defy category and convention. Not least, "In One Person" is an intimate and unforgettable portrait of the solitariness of a bisexual man who is dedicated to making himself "worthwhile".

Title: In One Person
Author: IRVING JOHN
Format: Trade Paperback
Publishing status: Active
Publication date: 10/05/2012
Price: $40.00
RRP: $40.00
Imprint: DoubleDay
Publisher: Transworld Publishers Ltd
ISBN: 9780857520975

It is 1867 and winter in Ryazan, a city on the banks of the Oka River in Central Russia. Konstantin is ten years old. His days are full of dreams of flight - to Moscow, even to the silent stars. But then, one day, he catches cold in the freezing woods near his home and his own world becomes silent. Left deaf by scarlet fever, his outlook is desperate. Only his fascination with a newly mechanised age and his astonishing visions of humanity's future seem to offer him any sort of hope. "Konstantin", Tom Bullough's brilliant, inspirational novel, tells the extraordinary story, based on a real-life character, of the first man to reveal how travel into space might be possible. It is a story of man, nature, and the limitless power of the imagination.

Title: Konstantin
Author: BULLOUGH TOM
Format: Trade Paperback
Publishing status: Active
Publication date: 01/03/2012
Price: $37.00
RRP: $37.00
Imprint: Penguin Books
Publisher: Penguin Books Ltd
ISBN: 9780670920921

One Sunday nine-year-old Jess Hall watches in horror as his autistic brother is smothered during a healing service in the mountains of North Carolina. Wiley Cash uses this haunting image - inspired by a horrific true event - to spin us into a spellbinding, heartbreaking story about cruelty and innocence, and the failure of faith and family to protect a child. This is a novel thick with stories and characters connected by faith, infidelity, and a sense of hope that is both tragic and unforgettable.

Title: Land More Kind Than Home
Author: CASH WILEY
Format: Trade Paperback
Publishing status: Active
Publication date: 29/03/2012
Price: $38.00
RRP: $38.00
Imprint: DoubleDay
Publisher: Transworld Publishers Ltd
ISBN: 9780857520708

I was to stand trial for my life. I was twenty-two years old. I had been married for ten weeks and a widow for six. In the summer of 1914, the Empress Alexandra, a magnificent ocean liner, suffers a mysterious explosion on its voyage from London to New York City. On board are Henry Winter, a rich banker, and his young new wife, Grace. Somehow, Henry manages to secure a place in a lifeboat for Grace. But the survivors quickly realize it is over capacity and could sink at any moment. For any to live, some must die. As the castaways battle the elements, and each other, Grace watches and waits. She is a woman who has learned the value of patience - her journey to a life of glittering privilege has been far from straightforward. Now, she knows, it is in jeopardy, and her very survival is at stake. Over the course of three perilous weeks, the passengers on the lifeboat plot, scheme, gossip and console one another while sitting inches apart. Their deepest beliefs about goodness, humanity and God are tested to the limit as they begin to discover what they will do in order to survive.
The Lifeboat is a page-turning story of moral dilemmas, and also the moving and haunting story of Grace, a woman as unforgettable and complicated as the story she recounts.

Title: Lifeboat
Author: ROGAN CHARLOTTE
Format: Trade Paperback
Publishing status: Active
Publication date: 29/03/2012
Price: $37.00
RRP: $37.00
Imprint: Virago
Publisher: Little, Brown Book Group
ISBN: 9781844087532

A compelling new mystery from the author of The Villa Triste

Title: Lost Daughter
Author: GRINDLE LUCRETIA
Format: Trade Paperback
Publishing status: Active
Publication date: 19/08/2011
Price: $40.00
RRP: $40.00
Imprint: Pan Books
Publisher: Pan Macmillan
ISBN: 9780230746237

Budo is Max's imaginary friend. He and his fellow imaginary friends watch over their children until the day comes that the child stops imagining them. And then they're gone. Budo has lasted a lot longer than most imaginary friends - four years - because Max needs him more. His parents argue about sending him to a special school. But Max is perfectly happy if everything is just kept the way it is, and nothing out of the ordinary happens. Unfortunately, something out of the ordinary is going to happen - and then he'll need Budo more than ever...

Title: Memoirs of an Imaginary Friend
Author: GREEN MATTHEW
Format: Paperback
Publishing status: Active
Publication date: 01/03/2012
Price: $30.00
RRP: $30.00
Imprint: Sphere
Publisher: Little, Brown Book Group
ISBN: 9781847445100

Babe, Grace and Millie have been best friends since their first day at their small town's only kindergarten. Despite their differences, they've played together, grown up together, shared each other's secrets. And when World War Two becomes a reality for America too, the girls begin a new phase of their lives together each quickly marries her first true love. With the men away, life is difficult for these newly married women, but when no fewer than sixteen telegrams arrive on a single morning in 1944, bearing news of the worst kind from the War Department, the girls know that nothing will ever be the same again ...As each woman struggles to rebuild a life, they face not only the challenges closest to home the brutal effects of war, the question of remarriage, of how to tell a child about their absent father but also the wider issues of a country in flux sexism, racism, anti-Semitism. Tinged with tragedy, yet filled with hope, Next to Love is the story of three women at the heart of the century a celebration of their friendship across decades of the most unthinkable adversity. It is a remarkable novel you are unlikely to forget.

Title: Next to Love
Author: FELDMAN ELLEN
Format: Paperback
Publishing status: Active
Publication date: 07/10/2011
Price: $35.00
RRP: $35.00
Imprint: Picador
Publisher: Pan Macmillan
ISBN: 9780330544504

Citizens of our beloved Democratic Republic of North Korea! Imagine the life of an orphan boy from nowhere who is plucked from his orphanage by the military, to be trained as a tunnel assassin, a kidnapper, a spy. He has no father but the State, no sweetheart but Sun Moon, the greatest opera star who ever lived, whose face is tattooed on his chest. Imagine he lives in our very own country, a model of exemplary Communism. A nation that is the envy of the world, especially the Americans. Where the only human stories people need to hear are those blasting out of loudspeakers to the glory of our dear Leader, Kim Jong il. Citizens! Who is this individual? What is his story? Who will remember him? Pak Jun Do is his name: wrestler of sharks, envoy to Texan barbecues, imposter extraordinaire, whose murderous biography has only come to light through the talents and stamina of our most patriotic interrogators. Dry your eyes now, comrades! This is the double-life story of a hero and martyr: the Greatest North Korean Love Story Ever Told. THE ORPHAN MASTER'S SON is an iconoclastic work of fiction, part thriller, part coming-of-age story, part love story. Dark, playful and genre-defying, its searing depiction of one man's epic journey through the surrealist brutality of North Korea shines a fierce light on the essence of the human condition. Warning: Any resemblance to real people and events may not be entirely coincidental

Title: Orphan Masters Son
Author: JOHNSON ADAM
Format: Trade Paperback
Publishing status: Active
Publication date: 02/03/2012
Price: $38.00
RRP: $38.00
Imprint: DoubleDay
ISBN: 9780857520562

Family, that slippery word, a star to every wandering bark, and everyone sailing under a different sky. After his mother's death, Richard, a newly remarried hospital consultant, decides to build bridges with his estranged sister, inviting Angela and her family for a week in a rented house on the Welsh border. Four adults and four children, a single family and all of them strangers. Seven days of shared meals, log fires, card games and wet walks. But in the quiet and stillness of the valley, ghosts begin to rise up. The parents Richard thought he had. The parents Angela thought she had. Past and present lovers. Friends, enemies, victims, saviours. And watching over all of them from high on the dark hill, Karen, Angela's stillborn daughter. "The Red House" is about the extraordinariness of the ordinary, weaving the words and thoughts of the eight characters together with those fainter, stranger voices - of books and letters and music, of the dead who once inhabited these rooms, of the ageing house itself and the landscape in which it sits.
Once again Mark Haddon, bestselling author of "The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time" and "A Spot of Bother" has written a novel that is funny, poignant and deeply insightful about human lives.

Title: Red House
Author: HADDON MARK
Format: Trade Paperback
Publishing status: Active
Publication date: 10/05/2012
Price: $37.00
RRP: $37.00
Imprint: Jonathan Cape
Publisher: Vintage
ISBN: 9780224096416

It is an early spring evening in 1943 when the air-raid sirens wail out over the East End of London. From every corner of Bethnal Green, people emerge from pubs, cinemas and houses and set off for the shelter of the tube station. But at the entrance steps, something goes badly wrong, the crowd panics, and 173 people are crushed to death. When an enquiry is called for, it falls to the local magistrate, Laurence Dunne, to find out what happened during those few, fatally confused minutes. But as Dunne gathers testimony from the guilt-stricken warden of the shelter, the priest struggling to bring comfort to his congregation, and the grieving mother who has lost her youngest daughter, the picture grows ever murkier. The more questions Dunne asks, the more difficult it becomes to disentangle truth from rumour - and to decide just how much truth the damaged community can actually bear. It is only decades later, when the case is reopened by one of the children who survived, that the facts can finally be brought to light ...

Title: Report
Author: KANE JESSICA
Format: Paperback
Publishing status: Active
Publication date: 05/01/2012
Price: $25.00
RRP: $25.00
Imprint: Portobello
Publisher: Granta Books
ISBN: 9781846272806

Stewart Gilmour is back in Stonemouth. After five years in exile his presence is required at the funeral of patriarch Joe Murston, and even though the last time Stu saw the Murstons he was running for his life, staying away might be even more dangerous than turning up. An estuary town north of Aberdeen, Stonemouth, with it's five mile beach, can be beautiful on a sunny day. On a bleak one it can seem to offer little more than seafog, gangsters, cheap drugs and a suspension bridge irresistible to suicides. And although there's supposed to be a temporary truce between Stewart and the town's biggest crime family, it's soon clear that only Stewart is taking this promise of peace seriously. Before long a quick drop into the cold grey Stoun begins to look like the soft option, and as he steps back into the minefield of his past to confront his guilt and all that it has lost him, Stu uncovers ever darker stories, and his homecoming takes a more lethal turn than even he had anticipated. Tough, funny, fast-paced and touching, Stonemouth cracks open adolescence, love, brotherhood and vengeance in a rite of passage novel like no other.

Title: Stonemouth
Author: BANKS IAIN
Format: Trade Paperback
Publishing status: Active
Publication date: 05/04/2012
Price: $37.00
RRP: $37.00
Imprint: Little Brown & Co
Publisher: Little, Brown Book Group
ISBN: 9781408702512

One late spring evening in 1912, in the kitchens at Sterne, preparations begin for an elegant supper party in honour of Emerald Torrington's twentieth birthday. But only a few miles away, a dreadful accident propels a crowd of mysterious and not altogether savoury survivors to seek shelter at the ramshackle manor - and the household is thrown into confusion and mischief. The cook toils over mock turtle soup and a chocolate cake covered with green sugar roses, which the hungry band of visitors are not invited to taste. But nothing, it seems, will go to plan. As the passengers wearily search for rest, the house undergoes a strange transformation. One of their number (who is most definitely not a gentleman) makes it his business to join the birthday revels. Evening turns to stormy night, and a most unpleasant game threatens to blow respectability to smithereens: Smudge Torrington, the wayward youngest daughter of the house, decides that this is the perfect moment for her Great Undertaking. The "Uninvited Guests" is the bewitching new novel from number one bestseller Sadie Jones.
The prizewinning author of "The Outcast" triumphs in this frightening yet delicious drama of dark surprises - where social codes are uprooted and desire daringly trumps propriety - and all is alight with Edwardian wit and opulence.

Title: Uninvited Guests
Author: JONES SADIE
Format: Trade Paperback
Publishing status: Active
Publication date: 22/03/2012
Price: $38.00
RRP: $38.00
Imprint: Chatto & Windus
Publisher: Vintage
ISBN: 9780701186722

Elizabeth George's masterly new novel sees Detective Inspector Thomas Lynley back centre stage in an intricate crime drama

Title: Believing the Lie
Author: GEORGE ELIZABETH
Format: Trade Paperback
Publishing status: Active
Publication date: 05/01/2012
Price: $40.00
RRP: $40.00
Imprint: Hodder & Stoughton
Publisher: Hodder & Stoughton General Div
ISBN: 9781444705980