What’s Hot This Winter
We can’t think of anything better to do on these cold winter days than curling up under a cozy blanket with a hot cuppa and a great book. If you’re ready to take a break from the world around you, we have you sorted with our top picks this winter.
One Hundred Days by Alice Pung
In a heady whirlwind of independence, lust and defiance, sixteen-year-old Karuna falls pregnant. Not on purpose, but not entirely by accident, either. Incensed, Karuna’s mother, already over-protective, confines her to their fourteenth-story housing-commission flat, to keep her safe from the outside world – and make sure she can’t get into any more trouble.
Stuck inside for endless hours, Karuna battles her mother and herself for a sense of power in her own life, as a new life forms and grows within her. As the due date draws ever closer, the question of who will get to raise the baby – who it will call Mum – festers between them.
One Hundred Days is available on eBook and eAudiobook on our BorrowBox platform or reserve in print to collect at your nearest branch.
The Dictionary of Lost Words by Pip Williams
In 1901, the word bondmaid was discovered missing from the Oxford English Dictionary. This is the story of the girl who stole it.
Set when the women’s suffrage movement was at its height and the Great War loomed, The Dictionary of Lost Words reveals a lost narrative, hidden between the lines of a history written by men. It’s a delightful, lyrical and deeply thought-provoking celebration of words, and the power of language to shape our experience of the world. Longlisted for the Indie Book Award 2021, this story is polarising – you either hate it or love it.
The Dictionary of Lost Words is available on eAudiobook on our BorrowBox platform or reserve in print to collect at your nearest branch.
You Need to Know by Nicola Moriarty
This new psycohological thriller by best-selling author of The Fifth Letter Nicola Moriarty follows the protagonists Jill, Mimi and Darren and the secrets they keep that all comes to a head one Christmas Eve. You Need to Know is a dark domestic drama about family secrets and lies, fractured relationships, tragic mistakes and the ultimate betrayal.
You Need to Know is available on eBook on our BorrowBox platform or reserve in print to collect at your nearest branch.
The Dressmakers of Yarrandarrah Prison by Merideth Jaffe
Derek’s daughter Debbie is getting married. He’s desperate to be there, but he’s banged up in Yarrandarrah Correctional Centre for embezzling funds from the golf club, and, thanks to his ex-wife, Lorraine, he hasn’t spoken to Debbie in years. He wants to make a grand gesture – to show her how much he loves her. But what?
Inspiration strikes while he’s embroidering a cushion at his weekly prison sewing circle – he’ll make her a wedding dress. His fellow stitchers rally around and soon this motley gang of crims is immersed in a joyous whirl of silks, satins and covered buttons.
But as time runs out and tensions rise both inside and outside the prison, the wedding dress project takes on greater significance. With lives at stake, Derek feels his chance to reconcile with Debbie is slipping through his fingers …
The Dressmakers of Yarrandarrah Prison is available on eBook and eAudiobook on our BorrowBox platform or reserve in print to collect at your nearest branch.
Girl A by Abigail Dean
Lex Gracie doesn’t want to think about her family. She doesn’t want to think about growing up in her parents’ House of Horrors. And she doesn’t want to think about her identity as Girl A: the girl who escaped, the eldest sister who freed her older brother and four younger siblings. It’s been easy enough to avoid her parents–her father never made it out of the House of Horrors he created, and her mother spent the rest of her life behind bars. But when her mother dies in prison and leaves Lex and her siblings the family home, she can’t run from her past any longer. Together with her sister, Evie, Lex intends to turn the House of Horrors into a force for good. But first she must come to terms with her siblings–and with the childhood they shared. Girl A has received rave reviews from authors such as Sophie Hannah, Paula Hawkins, Jeffery Deaver, and Marian Keyes.
Girl A is available on eBook on our BorrowBox platform or reserve in print to collect at your nearest branch.
Before You Knew My Name by Jacqueline Bublitz
Dead girls don’t usually get to tell their story, but Alice Lee has always been a different type of girl. When she arrives in New York on her eighteenth birthday, carrying nothing but $600 cash and a stolen Leica in her bag, Alice is a plucky teenager looking to start a new life away from her dark past. Now she’s ‘Jane Doe’, ‘Riverside Jane’, an unidentified body on a slab at City Morgue.
Newspaper headlines briefly report that ‘the body was discovered by a jogger’. Ruby Jones is a lonely Australian woman trying to put distance between herself and a destructive relationship back home, and is struggling in the aftermath of being the person to find Alice’s body. When she encounters Death Club, a small group of misfits who meet at bars around the city to discuss death and dying, she finds a safe space to explore her increasing obsession with the girl and her unidentified killer.
Before You Knew My Name by Jacqueline Bublitz is available on eBook on our BorrowBox platform or reserve in print to collect at your nearest branch.