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April 2012 Fiction
 vicbooks' Happenstance
We have completely transfered our old Turning Points credits onto our new system (we apologise for how long it has taken, we didn't realise how many of you there were!), so you can now spend any credit remained owing to you - just ask at either store and we can do the rest. We've also been busy in the blogosphere - see why we think you should read The Hunger Games. | April Fiction 2012
|  Waiting for Sunrise
by William Boyd, TP, $36.99 Vienna. 1913. It is a fine day in August when Lysander Rief, a young English actor, walks through the city to his first appointment with the eminent psychiatrist, Dr. Bensimon. Sitting in the waiting room he is anxiously pondering the nature of his problem when an extraordinary woman enters. She is clearly in distress, but Lysander is immediately drawn to her strange, hazel eyes and her unusual, intense beauty. Hername is Hettie Bull. London, 1914. War is stirring, and events in Vienna have caught up with Lysander. Unable to live an ordinary life, he is plunged into the dangerous theatre of wartime intelligence - a world of sex, scandal and spies, where lines of truth and deception blur with every waking day. Lysander must now discover the key to a secret code which is threatening Britain's safety, and use all his skills to keep the murky world of suspicion and betrayal from invading every corner of his life. From the author of Any Human Heart, Restless, and Ordinary Thunderstorms. Buy now |  Various Pets, Alive and Dead
by Marina Lewycka, TP, $37 Most normal parents, you'd think, would be pleased to have a son not yet thirty and earning ninety grand a year. But not Doro and Marcus. They'd consider it the ultimate betrayal of his ideals, meaning their ideals, because Serge doesn't claim to have any ideals apart from a vague general sense of goodwill towards mankind. And womankind. Especially Maroushka. Marcus and Doro were part of a left wing commune from the late 1960s until the early 1990s: lentils, free love, spliffs, Left politics, cheesecloth blouses, sex, housework and cooking rotas, crochet, allotments. Their children have grown up rather different from them: primary schoolteacher Clara craves order and clean bathrooms, son Serge is pretending to his parents that he is still doing a Maths PhD at Cambridge, while in fact working making loadsa money in the City; third child Oolie Anna, who has Downs Syndrome, is desperate to escape home and live on her own. Set half in Doncaster, half in London, this is a very funny riff on modern values, featuring hamsters, cockroaches, poodles, a Chicken and multiplying rabbits, told by Marina Lewycka in her unique and brilliant combination of irony, farce and wit. Buy now |  The Third Reich
by Roberto Bolano, TP, $39.99 Unpublished during Bolano's lifetime, the complete typescript of this novel - meticulously corrected by hand - was discovered after his death in 2003. This is the first English language publication. Shortly after becoming the German war-games champion, Udo Berger and his girlfriend, Ingeborg, take a holiday on the Costa Brava. There they meet another vacationing German couple, Charly and Hanna, and a band of shady locals - including the Wolf and the Lamb - who introduce them to the darker side of life in the town. Then, late one night, Charly disappears without a trace, and Udo's well-ordered life is thrown into upheaval... Refusing to leave the resort, even after Ingeborg returns home, Udo's increasingly feverish dreams push him into delirium. As everything slips beyond his grasp, he attempts to re-assert himself by engaging the enigmatic and severely disfigured El Quemado - a foreigner who lives in a Spartan burrow on the beach - in a days-long match of his favourite war game, Third Reich. But, too late to stop the madness, he realises that the consequences of this game are more serious than he ever imagined. Less fragmented than his shorter work, this visceral novel exploring memory, madness and violence will be both a welcome addition to the established oeuvre and a significant new work for those yet to discover the strange, oblique genius of Roberto Bolano. Buy now |  Lone Wolf
by Jodi Picoult, TP, $39.99 A life hanging in the balance ... a family torn apart. The #1 internationally bestselling author Jodi Picoult tells an unforgettable story about family, love, and letting go. Edward Warren, twenty-four, has been living in Thailand for five years, a prodigal son who left his family after an irreparable fight with his father, Luke. But he gets a frantic phone call: His dad lies comatose, gravely injured in the same accident that has also injured his younger sister Cara. With her father's chances for recovery dwindling, Cara wants to wait for a miracle. But Edward wants to terminate life support and donate his father's organs. Is he motivated by altruism, or revenge? And to what lengths will his sister go to stop him from making an irrevocable decision? LONE WOLF explores the notion of family, and the love, protection and strength it's meant to offer. But what if the hope that should sustain it, is the very thing that pulls it apart? Another tour de force from Jodi Picoult, LONE WOLF examines the wild and lonely terrain upon which love battles reason. Buy now |  The Gods of Gotham
by Lyndsay Faye, TP, $36.99 One of the breakout debuts of 2012 - a unique historical thriller set in melting pot New York. In the summer of 1845, following years of passionate political dispute, New York City at long last formed a Police Department. The potato, a crop that can be trusted to yield reliable nutrition from barren, limited space, had long been the base staple of the Irish tenant farmer. By the summer of 1845, newspapers worldwide had begun to report anxiously that an infestation called blight was laying waste to potato crops throughout Ireland. These twin events would change the city of New York forever. Timothy Wilde is a reluctant, newly minted NYPD. One night while making his rounds, he runs into, literally, a little slip of a girl covered head to toe in blood. When she claims she knows where dozens of bodies are buried, Timothy finds himself tracking down a brutal serial killer seemingly hell bent on fanning the flames of anti-Irish immigrant sentiment and engaged in a battle for the truth that nearly costs him his brother, his romantic obsession, and his own life. Buy now |  Phantom
by Jo Nesbo, TP, $37.99 After his appearances at the Wellington Writers & Readers Festival, Jo Nesbo has rapidly been expanding his audience in NZ. Read the new book by the man who is displacing Stieg Larsson. Summer. A boy is lying on the floor of an Oslo apartment. He is bleeding and will soon die. In order to place his life and death in some kind of context he begins to tell his story. Outside, the church bells toll. Autumn. Former police inspector Harry Hole returns to Oslo after three years abroad. He seeks out his old boss at Police Headquarters to request permission to investigate a homicide. But the case is already closed: the young junkie was in all likelihood shot dead by a fellow addict. Yet, Harry is granted permission to visit the boy's alleged killer in jail. There, he meets himself and his own history. What follows is the solitary investigation of what appears to be the first impossible case in Harry Hole's career. And while Harry is searching, the murdered boy continues his story. A man walks the dark streets of Oslo. The streets are his and he has always been there. He is a phantom. Buy now |   Sign up to our Facebook page and Blog for events, competitions and our perspective on the bookish universe. |
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