Cat Catcher

Caroline Shaw

Meet Lenny Aaron, a Zen-cool young ex-cop with a few left-field addictions, a super droll style and a seedy little office of her own in downtown Footscray. Sworn off true crime after a harrowing experience on duty, Lenny earns her living tracking missing cats down Melbourne’s alleys and byways.

But everything changes for Lenny when a routine search for a daughter’s missing Ragdoll brings her into the viperous bosom of Australia’s most powerful media family. The patriarch is dying, and the stakes are sky-high for a piece of the action. When someone takes it, brutally, Lenny finds herself back in the murder business.

And is doesn’t stop there. While Lenny trawls through the morass of corruption, sex, greed, power and money to find the killer, she is forced to confront her haunting past. Will her feline cunning and ice-cool courage be enough to survive? -- book cover
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Gilead

Marilynne Robinson

In 1956, towards the end of Reverend John Ames life, he begins a letter to his young son: "I told you last night that I might be gone sometime ... you reached up and put your fingers on my lips and gave that look I never in my life say on any other face beside your mother's. It's a kind of furious pride, very passionate and stern. I'm always a little surprised to find my eyebrows unsinged after I've suffered one of those looks. I will miss them." - book cover

This book was chosed by the New York Times Book Review as one of the top six novels of the year.

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In Her Shoes

Jennifer Weiner

Rose Feller is thirty; a successful lawyer with high hopes of a relationship with Jim, Mr Not-Quite-Right, a senior partner in her firm. The last thing she needs is her messed-up, only occasionally employed sister Maggie moving in: drinking, smoking, stealing her money - and her shoes - and spoiling her chance of romance. If only Maggie would grow up and settle down with a nice guy and a steady job.

Maggie is drop dead gorgeous and irresistible to men. She's going to make it big as a TV presenter, or a singer, or an actress. All she needs is a lucky break. What she doesn't need is her uptight sister Rose interfering in her life. If only Rose would lighten-up, have some fun - and learn how to use a pair of tweezers.

Rose and Maggie think they have nothing in common but a childhood tragedy, shared DNA and the same size feet, but they are about to find out that they're more alike than they's ever believe."

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One True Thing

Anna Quindlen

Ellen Gulden is a young, successful New York journalist. When her mother gets cancer, her father, a university professor, insists she come home. As she looks after her mother their relationship, tender, awkward and revealing – deepens and Ellen is forced to confront painful truths about herself and her adored father.

But as Kate lies during, and in the weeks that follow her death, events take a shocking and unexpected turn. Family emotions are laid bare as a new drama is played out: between Ellen and her brothers, between Ellen and her father, and in court. – book cover.
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Under the Lake

Stuart Woods

The lake had been built at a terrible price to satisfy one man’s obsession. But its horrifying secret still lay beneath the placid waters … waiting.
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Titan

James McVean

Ronsay, an idyllic Hebridean island set in a turbulent indigo sea. To the whale, wounded, desperate, hunted almost to exhaustion, it represented a single chance for survival, its shoals a very present help in time of trouble.

But for its inhabitants, Ronsay was a social and economic cul de sac, a relic of threadbare feudalism dragging its slow way towards extinction.

The arrival of the whale could perhaps change all that. To Alex Lindsay, proprietor of Ronsay’s only hotel, the whale meant hope – of profit, of a future. To Lady Strathmore, Ronsay’s laird, and her grand-daughter, it meant one more, perhaps the last and overwhelming problem in the grim struggle against decay. To the interloper Koenig, tycoon and despot, it represented the key to an ElDorado. To Billy Con, American naturalist, it was a Cause. But to the ordinary people of the island, the great animal was a prize round which to rehearse ancient enmities. – book cover
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Worth Her Salt

Margaret Bevege, Margaret James & Carmel Shute, editors

Worth Her Salt brings together research and recollection in an illuminating exploration of women’s experiences in Australia. A collection of refreshing diversity, its range of topics includes sexual harassment at work, flappers and their lifestyle, the continuing fight for equal pay, and women pioneers of politics and social reform; it ranges from education in Adelaide at the turn of the century to life in north Queensland in World War II, and looks at the contemporary implications of technological change. – book cover
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Vivia

Tanith Lee

Vivia, a paragon of youth and beauty, daughter of Lord Vaddix, is alienated from his brutal campaign of violence and fear. Her only solace lies n the secret cave in the bowels of the castle, known only to her and the arcane god whose shrine she believes it is.

When plague enters the castle, bringing an orgy of death and destruction, Vivia seeks shelter in this seductive place. Drawn to her innocence and beauty, a presence – Zulgaris – is resurrected who claims her as his own. Wakened to the wonder of the undead, Vivia is granted the secret of eternal life, but she has been betrayed. Her immortality stretches before her like a damnation.

Handsome Zulgaris, dark prince, war-leader and alchemist. Is Vivia to be his love – or his pet? Or, far worse, is she but one more thing to be used in his relentless quest for sorcerous power? -- book cover
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Science Show II

Robyn William, editor

This selection of talks and interviews is as diverse and provocative as the programme itself. There is cosmology, psychology, technology; there are engineers and philosophers; there is botany, zoology, geography…and a touch of whimsy. - book cover
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Rooks Nest

June Barraclough

“The time is the mid-nineteenth century and Meta Moore is living with her adopted Aunt Augusta, at Hartsedge Hall in Yorkshire. Her dream is to return to Rooks Nest, the house where she was born – and where her mother died – with its lake and neglected gardens. Her obsession with the place does not diminish as she reaches adolescence and meets her first object of affection: Lavinia Logan, a “woman of the world” who comes to teach at her aunt’s school; nor later when she goes away from home as a governess to a Jewish family and whilst these falls passionately in love with a young musician, Daniel Reiss. Never a conformist, Meta has a painful gorwing up before she is able to discover happiness.” – book cover.
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The Ragged School

F.K.Salwood

Having lost her husband at Dunkirk, Rebecca Daniels is not only raising her young daughter, Kim, single-handedly, but is coping with the demands of full-time teaching.

Then fate plays a hand in the form of a letter from Rebecca’s Great Aunt Amelia. She is the owner of a school at Hornchurch in Essex and invites Rebecca to come and teach there. She accepts the invitation with relief and soon forms a close bond with her feisty great aunt. Rebecca also comes to the attention of several suitors including Sergeant Luke Adams, a Cornish pilot from the neighbouring RAF base, and the attractive Dr. Christopher Bates….” – book cover

Kick Back

Val McDermid

Kate Brannigan, feisty Manchester-based PI, is back, investigating the bizarre case of the missing conservatories. Before long she’s up to her neck in crooked land deals, mortgage scams, financial chicanery and murder. But when a favour for a friend puts Kate’s own life in danger, bizarre is not the first word she thinks of….” – book cover
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Gold Mine

Wilbur Smith

Set in South Africa …, a brutal tale of violence, greed, chicanery and lust amid the gold dust.. packed with action and excitement it surges along in crisp style. – Sunday Express
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Dagon’s Bell and Other Discords

Brian Lumley

Here is another devil’s dozen of nerve-shredding stories of horror and the supernatural from the man who gave you the internationally bestselling Necroscope and Vampire World series. Brian Lumley’s Dagon’s Bell and Other Discords maintains the great tradition of total fear established by his Fruiting Bodies and Other Fungi.” – book cover
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A Good Yarn

Debbie Macomber

This one is a good read for a wet weekend or for those times when you are feeling a little down and need something light to refresh you. It is set in Seattle and relates the events which follow the establishment of Lydia Hoffman’s knitting group in her yarn shop called A Good Yarn. The book itself is a good yarn.
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