You know when something’s coming up and you keep getting small thrills of excitement because it’s so good and you can’t wait for it to happen?
That’s how we’ve been feeling at Text for months about our October books. (Okay, we feel like that for all of our books, but there’s been just a leetle bit more excitement for this month’s list.)
Take a look and you’ll see why!
And for the chance to win one of these tremendous tomes, head over to our Facebook page and tell us which one you’d like to win and why.
Two Steps Forward by Graeme Simsion, author of The Rosie Project, and Anne Buist, author of Medea’s Curse, transports you to the mountains and valleys of France and Spain for an invigorating and inspirational trek along the Camino.
Zoe and Martin are each at a turning point in their lives. Following the footsteps of pilgrims who have walked the Camino – the Way – for centuries, they hope to learn more about where they’re going. And perhaps to find each other.
The Trauma Cleaner: One Woman’s Extraordinary Life in Death, Decay & Disaster by Sarah Krasnostein skilfully and devotedly documents the transformative life of Sandra Pankhurst: raised in a working-class suburb of Melbourne as the abused adopted son of a Catholic family, now the owner of a successful trauma-cleaning business. From an early marriage, fatherhood and divorce, to sex work in the drag clubs of St Kilda and the brothels of Kalgoorlie, to life as Victoria’s first female funeral director and then a Brighton housewife, Sandra lost it all and turned her life around once again.
Sandra’s story is interwoven with her interactions with her clients, whose lives are frequently lost in decay and trauma. It is unforgettable.
Melanie Raabe is back with a new chilling psychological thriller, The Stranger. Sarah’s missing husband is found alive after seven years – but the man who appears on her doorstep is a stranger, and he makes a threat. He knows everything about Sarah, and if she exposes him, she’ll lose all she holds dear: her house, her son, her whole beautiful life.
Why Time Flies: A Mostly Scientific Investigation by Alan Burdick will ensure you never look at a clock the same way again. Framed by his own shifting experience of time following the birth of his twin sons, Burdick’s work also draws on philosophy, religion, neurobiology, psychology and other fields, both ancient and modern, to comprehend humankind’s curious relationship with time. Burdick visits ancient historical sites, cutting-edge scientific laboratories and even the Arctic Circle in his vivid and intimate examination of the clocks that tick inside us all.
Set Me Free: The Story of How Shakespeare Saved A Life by Salvatore Striano is a largely autobiographical, wonderfully affecting novel about crime, redemption, the Mafia and the transformative power of reading.
Sasà grew up in Naples. He never went to school, and instead grew up with street violence and bloodshed, becoming the leader of a gang of boys mixed up with the Camorra by the age of fourteen. At the age of thirty, he was in prison, his life all but mapped out.
That’s when Shakespeare steps in. At Sasà’s most hopeless point, he is persuaded to join the prison’s drama troupe. In Shakespeare’s The Tempest, Sasà stumbles on what he needs to explain the world which has defined his own life.
Sourdough by Robin Sloan will enchant and bewitch you – and make you extremely hungry. From the author of the much-loved novel Mr Penumbra’s 24-Hour Bookstore comes a story about a life-changing loaf of bread.
Lois Clary, a software engineer at a San Francisco robotics company, becomes the unlikely hero tasked to care for the starter for the perfect sourdough bread, bake with it and keep this needy colony of microorganisms alive. Soon she is baking loaves daily and taking them to the farmer’s market, where an exclusive close-knit club runs the show.
When Lois discovers another, more secret market, aiming to fuse food and technology, a whole other world opens up. But who are these people, exactly?
The Benefactor by Sebastian Hampson, author of The Train to Paris, is set in the glamorous world of galleries and high-end magazine publishing in New York.
Henry Calder has lost his job and his wife. He meets a rebellious young artist and offers her a place to stay. But there’s something about the young woman and her work that disturbs him, and soon Henry is facing a crisis neither of them could ever have foreseen.
Suburbia by Jeremy Chambers superbly evokes the sights, smells and sounds of suburban life in the eighties as well as the angst of teenagers trapped in the lives of their parents. Roland lives with his parents, Graham and Joyce, and his younger sister, Lily, in the golden light of an outer suburb – Glenella. He dreams of escaping, of finding an intoxicating life somewhere else.
He is in love with Cassie Noble, the daughter of his parents’ friends Reg and Colleen. But when Darren Wilson moves into the neighbourhood and attracts the interest of both teens, a conflict emerges that threatens the friendship between the two families.
Freeman’s: The Future of New Writing is the special fourth installment of the acclaimed literary anthology from leading editor and critic John Freeman. The Future of New Writing features more than twenty-five poets, essayists, novelists and short-story writers from around the world who are shaping the literary conversation right now and will continue to influence it in years to come.
The War I Finally Won by Kimberly Brubaker Bradley will inspire the same emotions and tears evoked by the first book in this series, The War That Saved My Life.
Ada and her brother, Jamie, are living with their guardian, Susan, in a cottage in the English countryside, on the estate of the formidable Lady Thorton and her daughter, Maggie, Ada’s dearest friend. Life in the crowded cottage is tense. Then Ruth, a Jewish girl from Germany, moves in. A German? Everyone is horrified. Ada must decide – where do her loyalties lie?
Saving Marty by Paul Griffin is an unforgettable story about the power of friendship…and the unsung heroes all around us.
Eleven-year-old Lorenzo thinks he’s kind of ordinary. Not brave like his father, who died in the war, or an amazing musician, like his best friend, Paloma. But Renzo finally gets the chance to do something heroic when he adopts a runt piglet named Marty.
Our Text Classic for October is The Life and Adventures of William Buckley, written by William Buckley himself, with an introduction by Tim Flannery.
‘At 2.00 pm on Sunday, 6 July 1835, a giant of a man shambled into the camp left by John Batman at Indented Head near Geelong…’
In 1803 the convict William Buckley, a former soldier, escaped from the first official settlement in Victoria, near Sorrento on Port Phillip Bay. For three decades the ‘wild white man’ lived with Aborigines around the bay, before giving himself up in 1835. First published in 1852, The Life and Adventures of William Buckley is the ultimate survival story of early Australia and provides an extraordinary insight into pre-contact indigenous society.
If you made it all the way to here, then you’re dying to read all of the above. For your chance to win one of them visit our Facebook page now and tell us which book you would like (a couple o’ couplets would be delightful).
Competition is open to AU/NZ residents only and entries close midnight AEST Sunday 8 October. Winners will be notified on Facebook (one book per person only).
