Picks of the month
Book of the Month: November 2024
Benjamin Stevenson returns with a Christmas addition to his bestselling Ernest Cunningham mysteries.
After having solved two relatively high-profile murders, Cunningham’s third case begins when a body drops dead at his feet during a Christmas pageant.
The suspects are all professional tricksters: masters of the art of misdirection. The clues are even more abstract: A suspect covered in blood, without a memory of how it got there; A murder committed without setting foot inside the room where it happens; And an advent calendar of 23 clues and a killer, because the best chocolate’s always behind door number 24.
If he can see through the illusions, he knows he can solve it. After all, a good murder is just like a magic trick, isn’t it?
Click here to access this item.
See the author in person
Join bestselling author Benjamin Stevenson (Everyone in My Family Has Killed Someone) to discuss our spotlighted book, Everyone This Christmas Has a Secret on Thursday 28 November at Woollahra Library at Double Bay.
Light refreshments provided. Books available for sale by Gertrude & Alice Bookstore. $10, bookings essential.
Get your tickets
Spotlight on 2024 Prize Winning Fiction
Praiseworthy by Alexis Wright
Praiseworthy is an epic set in the north of Australia, told with the richness of language and scale of imagery for which Alexis Wright has become renowned. In a small town dominated by a haze cloud, which heralds both an ecological catastrophe and a gathering of the ancestors, a crazed visionary seeks out donkeys as the solution to the global climate crisis and the economic dependency of the Aboriginal people. Praiseworthy is novel which pushes allegory and language to its limits, a cry of outrage against oppression and disadvantage, and a fable for the end of days. In 2024 Alexis Wright made history as the first author to win the Miles Franklin and The Stella Prize (both national literary prizes) for the same work.
Access this item here
In Ascension by Martin MacInnes
Leigh grew up in Rotterdam, drawn to the waterfront as an escape from her unhappy home life and volatile father. Enchanted by the undersea world of her childhood, she excels in marine biology, travelling the globe to study ancient organisms. When a trench is discovered in the Atlantic Ocean, Leigh joins the exploration team, hoping to find evidence of the earth's first life forms - what she instead finds calls into question everything we know about our own beginnings. Exploring the natural world with wonder and reverence In Ascension is a compassionate, deeply inquisitive epic that reaches outward to confront the greatest questions of existence. Winner of the 2024 Arthur C Clarke Award for Best Science Fiction Novel.
Access this item here
Anam by André Dao
Anam is a novel about memory and inheritance, colonialism and belonging, home and exile. A grandson tries to learn the family story. Moving from 1930s Hanoi through a series of never-ending wars and displacements to Saigon, Paris, Melbourne and Cambridge, Anam blends fiction and essay, theory and everyday life to imagine what has been repressed, left out, and forgotten. The grandson mines his family and personal stories to turn over ideas that resonate with all of us around place and home, legacy and expectation, ambition and sacrifice. Anam won Best Fiction at the 2024 Prime Minister’s Literary Awards.
Access this item here
Night Watch by Jayne Anne Phillips
From one of our most accomplished novelists, a mesmerising story about a mother and daughter seeking refuge in a mental asylum in the chaotic aftermath of the Civil War. Twelve-year-old ConaLee and her mother, Eliza, who hasn't spoken in more than a year, arrive at the Trans-Allegheny Lunatic Asylum in West Virginia, delivered to the hospital entrance by a war veteran who has forced himself into their lives. Epic, enthralling, and meticulously crafted, Night Watch is a brilliant portrait of family endurance against all odds, and a stunning chronicle of surviving war and its aftermath. Winner of the 2024 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction
Access this item here
Some desperate glory by Emily Tesh
A thrillingly told queer space opera about the wreckage of war, the family you find, and who you must become when every choice is stripped from you Since she was born, Kyr has trained for the day she can avenge the murder of planet Earth. Raised in the bowels of Gaea Station alongside the last scraps of humanity, she readies herself to face the Wisdom, the powerful, reality-shaping weapon that gave the majoda their victory over humanity. Some Desperate Glory won the 2024 Hugo Award for Best Novel.
Access this item here