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The best books of 2014

Sturt292014 has been another wonderful year for literature, a classic case of so many books, so little time. I ended the year having read 80 books, predominantly fiction novels, but including one play (Mike Bartlett’s perceptive and witty King Charles 111, works of non-fiction and collections of short stories.

An Unnecessary Woman by Rabih Alameddine (Text)

The UnAmericans by Molly Antopol (W.W.Norton)

The Sound of Things Falling by Juan Gabriel Vasquez (Bloomsbury)

Colourless Tsukuru Tazaki by Haruki Murakami (Alfred A Knopf)

Thank you For Your Service by David Finkle (Text)

Beyond the Beautiful Forever by Katherine Boo (Random House)

The Golden Age by Joan London (Random House Australia)

We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves by Karen Joy Fowler (Allen & Unwin)

A Winter’s Book by Tove Jansson (A Sort of Book)

His Own Man by Ribeiro Edgard (Text):

The gender division was 66-44 per cent to the blokes, the authors came from

Chill winds fuel a week of good reading from Jonas Jonasson and Natalie Haynes

I’m not sure if it is the chilly winds currently swirling around or just the  abundance of books from which to choose but the pages have been flying by this week with two entertaining but very different novels.

First off the bedside table was The Girl Who Saved The King of Sweden, written by Jonas SwedenJonasson, which is a follow-up to his phenomenally successful The Hundred Year Old Man Who Climbed out of a Window.

The book is a literary six degrees of separation linking a semi-literate (but genius) South African orphan Nombeko Mayeki, a secret government nuclear establishment, an Israeli spy unit, a missing missile, the Swedish refugee program, twins (who exist only as one person), a gun-toting granny, the President of China and, of course, the King of Sweden.

It’s a gloriously crazy, intricate, layered book with a slightly Alice in Wonderland feel. However, peel back the layers of madness and mayhem and world-changing

Alex Miller’s Coal Creek was one of my favourite books of 2013; I think it will be even better on re-reading

resized_9781743316986_224_297_FitSquareIn Coal Creek, Alex Miller’s latest book, he takes the reader back to the ruggedly sparse Stone country of Central Queensland’s, Australia, where he had himself worked as a stockman. This is the setting for his earlier books Landscape of Farewell and Journey to the Stone Country and it’s an area he knows well and in the harshness of which he is comfortable.

Bobby Blue is the son of a stockman and has spent all his life in the small town of Mount Hay “the end of the line then, and still, as far as I know that country”. This is his environment and he seeks no other. He is the cipher through which the reader views the land, and the ensuing events. After the death of his father, a gentle, knowing, man of that land, he goes to work for the new local constable Daniel Collins. Collins had been a volunteer with the Australian forces in New Guinea and then joined the Queensland Police Service. And he arrives with his wife, Esme, and his two daughters.

Peter Corris’s new book Silent Kill welcomes back private eye Cliff Hardy who gets things done his way

SilentKillCliff Hardy is the kind of man you would like to have in your repertoire of acquaintances. He’d be the one you’d go to when an issue of moral ambiguity arose, like when the people next door keep playing their music too loud and too late and ignore polite requests to desist but you are too worried about repercussions to complain to the police. Somehow, in a way you don’t really want to know, he would persuade them to stop. Indeed, they might even nod a faux friendly hello to you should you meet in the street or when you drop off the packages which the postie keeps  leaving on your doorstep because he won’t set foot on their drive ever since he had a run-in with your neighbour’s Pitbull.

Hardy, Peter Corris’s Aussie iconic private eye, has returned in his 39th book, Silent Kill which was released just after we’d stopped welcoming in 2014. It’s been a lean period for Hardy work wise and he is persuaded to sign on for what seems an easy gig. He’s to be the bodyguard for Rory O’Hara, a former crusading

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