Need to keep the kids entertained these school holidays? Drop into your local Collins Booksellers store and pick up a copy of our July Great Monthly Reads. There are plenty of suggestions in there to keep the kids entertained over the school holidays.
Fiction
Following a bitter separation, Lucie moves to London to take up a position with a prestigious law firm. It seems an optimistic new beginning, until one day she receives a hand delivered note with the strange words: At last I’ve found you. A shock I ‘m sure. But in time I ‘ll explain. Martin.
Lucie hasn’t forgotten a man called Martin who was tragically killed twenty years ago in the 9/11 attacks. When she was working in New York as a young intern Lucie had fallen in love with him and he vowed to leave his wife to be with her permanently.
As an inexplicable series of events occur Lucie wonders if her long-dead lover could have staged his own disappearance under the cover of that fateful day. Or could it be that someone else is stalking her, or that her vivid imagination is playing tricks? Australian author
Leigh and her sister Callie are not bad people - but one night, more than two decades ago, they did something terrible. And the result was a childhood tarnished by secrets, broken by betrayal, devastated by violence.Years later, Leigh has pushed that night from her mind and become a successful lawyer - but when she is forced to take on a new client against her will, her world begins to spiral out of control.
Because the client knows the truth about what happened twenty-three years ago. He knows what Leigh and Callie did. And unless they stop him, he's going to tear their lives apart ... Release date 7th July
Yiannis is a poacher, trapping the tiny protected songbirds that stop in Cyprus as they migrate each year from Africa to Europe, and selling them on the black market. He dreams of finding a new way of life, and of marrying Nisha, who works for Petra and her daughter Angela. Nisha is raising Angela, mothering her own child back in Sri Lanka by the screen of a phone.
When Nisha disappears, Yiannis is convinced he is responsible, paralysed by heartbreak and fear. Petra is forced to care for her child again, and when little Angela insists that they find Nisha, she begins to see that Nisha hasn't simply run away, and that no one else will bother to look for her.
Ambitious young journalist Lo Robertson would do anything to escape the suffocating confines of her small home town. While begrudgingly covering the annual show for the local newspaper, Lo is horrified to discover the mutilated corpse of her best friend - the town's reigning showgirl, Lily Williams. Seven strange symbols have been ruthlessly carved into Lily’s back. But when Lo reports her grisly find to the town’s police chief, he makes her promise not to tell anyone about the symbols. Lo obliges, though it’s not like she has much of a choice - after all, he is also her father.
When Lily’s murder makes headlines around the country and the town is invaded by the media, Lo seizes the opportunity to track down the killer and make a name for herself by breaking the biggest story of her life. What Lo uncovers is that her sleepy home town has been harbouring a deadly secret, one so shocking that it will captivate the entire nation. Lo’s story will change the course of her life forever, but in a way she could never have dreamed of. Australian author
Sydney, present day. Anna is released into the world after eight years in prison. The entirety of her possessions stuffed into a single plastic bag. The trauma of her past, a much heavier burden to carry. Feeling hopeless, isolated and deeply lonely, Anna attends an alternative support group; The Women’s Circle.
But when she touches an ancient crystal, Anna connects to a woman she has never met, in a past she doesn’t recognise.
In 1770, a brutal regime torments the English village of Quarrendon and is determined to keep its women apart. Young villager Aisleen desperately seeks a way to defy the rules, reunite with her sister, and live life on her own terms, without her husband’s permission. The stakes are high and terror of punishment inescapable, but doing nothing comes at an even steeper price...
While separated by generations, Anna finds herself drawn to the spine-chilling and courageous plight of Aisleen and Quarrendon’s women. Can their bond help her to face her past and embrace her second chance at life? Australian author
Philomena has defied the odds and become a promising young officer with the Metropolitan Police despite being the daughter of a notorious London gangster.
Called to the scene of a domestic assault one day, she rescues a bloodied young woman, Tempe Brown, the mistress of a decorated detective. The incident is hushed up, but Phil has unwittingly made a dangerous enemy with powerful friends.
Determined to protect each other, the two women strike up a tentative friendship. Tempe is thoughtful and sweet and makes herself indispensable to Phil, but sinister things keep happening and something isn't quite right about the stories Tempe tells.
When a journalist with links to Phil's father and to the detective is found floating in the Thames, Phil doesn't know where to turn, who to blame or who she can trust.
I know lots of things now that I'm dead. Peter from Apartment Two has a spastic bladder. My former boss Morgan keeps her toenails in a gold jewellery box. My brother and his wife are trying for a baby. I always excuse myself before things get too heated.
I don't know much about my mother yet. I am waiting for grief to catch her, but she mostly seems ashamed-of her body, of what it made.
With piercing insights into transnational Asian identity, intergenerational trauma and grief, the dynamics of mother-daughter relationships and the inexplicable oddities of female friendship Paige has crafted an exquisite, moving and sophisticated debut work of fiction.
Biographies
Clem Bastow grew up feeling like she’d missed a key memo on human behaviour. She found the unspoken rules of social engagement confusing, arbitrary and often stressful. Friendships were hard, relationships harder, and the office was a fluorescent-lit nightmare of anxiety. It wasn’t until Clem was diagnosed as autistic, at age 36, that things clicked into focus.
The obsession with sparkly things and dinosaurs. The encyclopaedic knowledge of popular music. The meltdowns that would come on like a hurricane. The ability to write eloquently while conquering basic maths was like trying to understand ancient Greek.
These weren’t just ‘personality quirks’ but autistic traits that shaped Clem’s life in powerful ways.
With wit and warmth, Clem reflects as an autistic adult on her formative experiences as an undiagnosed young person, from the asphalt playground of St Joseph's Primary School in Melbourne to working as an entertainment journalist in Hollywood. Australian author
Elizabeth von Armin may have been born on the shores of Sydney Harbour, but it was in Victorian London that she discovered society and society discovered her.
She made her Court debut before Queen Victoria at Buckingham Palace, was pursued by a Prussian count and married into the formal world of the European aristocracy. It was the novels she wrote about that life that turned her into a literary sensation on both sides of the Atlantic and had her likened to Jane Austen.
Her marriage to the count produced five children but little happiness. Her second marriage to Bertrand Russell's brother was a disaster. But by then she had captivated the great literary and intellectual circles of London and Europe. She brought into her orbit the likes of Nancy Astor, Lady Maud Cunard, her cousin Katherine Mansfield and other writers such as E.M. Forster, Somerset Maugham and H.G. Wells, with whom it was said she had a tempestuous affair.
A mission to collect breadfruit from Tahiti becomes the most famous mutiny in history when the crew rise up against Captain William Bligh.
Bligh’s remarkable journey back to safety is well documented, but the fates of the mutinous men remain shrouded in mystery. Some settled in Tahiti only to face capture and court martial, others sailed on to form a secret colony on Pitcairn Island, the most remote inhabited island on earth, avoiding detection for twenty years.
When an American captain stumbled across the island in 1808, only one of the Bounty mutineers was left alive.
Told by a direct descendant of Fletcher Christian, Men Without Country details the journey of the Bounty, and the lives of the men aboard. Lives dominated by a punishing regime of hard work and scarce rations, and deeply divided by the hierarchy of class. It is a tale of adventure and exploration punctuated by moments of extreme violence – towards each other and the people of the South Pacific. Australian author
As the first Muslim woman in any Australian parliament, the one hundredth woman in the Senate, and the only engineer in the Senate, Mehreen has a unique and crucial perspective on our country and how things are changing for the better or worse.
This is the story of a brown, migrant Muslim woman breaking into a white man's world and striving to change it without being changed. It is an honest, no holds barred account of what happens when reality meets perception and when you shatter long held stereotypes and confront a system steeped in privileged hierarchies, racism and sexism. Australian author
Non-Fiction
In 2019, Bridie Jabour wrote a piece for the Guardian about the malaise of millennials and how the painful, protracted end of their adolescence is finally hitting home. They're looking at their lives and thinking: 'Is this it?
The article went viral overnight and Bridie decided the time had come to write a book about her generation - those much-maligned millennials. After all, she reasoned, this generation is coming of age in a unique set of social and economic circumstances, including precarious work, delayed baby-making, rising singledom, a heating planet, loss of religion, increased unstable housing and, now, a pandemic.
But despite her assumption that this generation of 31-year-olds is the most miserable ever, she discovered that wasn't the whole truth ... Release date 7th July Australian author
In 2013 Jaivet Ealom fled Myanmar's brutal regime, where Rohingya like him were being persecuted and killed, and boarded a boat of asylum seekers bound for Australia. Instead of receiving refuge, he was transported to Australia's infamous Manus Regional Processing Centre.
Blistering hot days spent in shipping containers on the island melted into weeks, then years until, finally, facing either jail in Papua New Guinea or being returned to almost certain death in Myanmar, he took matters into his own hands.
Drawing inspiration from the hit show Prison Break, Jaivet meticulously planned his escape. He made it out alive but was stateless, with no ID or passport. While the nightmare of Manus was behind him, his true escape to freedom had only just begun.
How Jaivet made it to sanctuary in Canada in a six-month-long odyssey by foot, boat, car and plane, with nothing but his instinct for survival, is miraculous.
So, this isn't at all what you had in mind, or where you thought you'd end up . . . as a single parent, raising kids on your own - at least some of the time. You're battling the day-to-day grind, making life-defining decisions while helping with homework and Book Week costumes, all the while working and maybe even having a social life. It can be arduous, lonely and overwhelming. But it can also be liberating - not just adapting to your new normal, but wholeheartedly embracing it.
What if you saw your circumstances as an opportunity for new beginnings and a call to step up in ways you never thought possible? Australian author
Having to deal with the loss of loved ones is something that unites us all. Yet we rarely even talk about grief. Life After shares the raw, intimate and inspiring stories of how more than 60 ordinary and well-known Australians have recovered from heart-breaking loss and have rebounded to live fuller lives than they once thought possible. Full of optimism and spirit, this book features famous people who have lost loved ones, people whose loved ones were famous, the bereaved behind our biggest news stories and a gamut of experiences from every walk of life in Australia. Release date 13th July. Australian author
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