Wolf Hall by Hilary Mantel

We are delighted to be presenting Hilary Mantel as part of the 2012 Sydney Writers’ Festival. Winner of the Man Booker Prize in 2009 for Wolf Hall, Hilary Mantel will be releasing the much anticipated sequel Bring Up The Bodies this month. You can purchase tickets to see Hilary Mantel speak with Michael Cathcart here.

The Good Book by A.C. Grayling

The Sydney Writers’ Festival is delighted to be presenting A.C Grayling on April 17. An esteemed previous judge of the Man Booker Prize, we have selected Grayling’s latest novel, The Good Book, as this month’s book club choice.

‘An extravagantly erudite manifesto for rational thought.' Sydney Morning Herald.

If you haven’t already experienced The Slap…

Summer is finally upon us and smoke from backyard barbecues fills the sky. With this in mind, we’ve chosen the The Slap as this month’s book club choice. The novel has caused plenty of debate and become a massive international bestseller.

‘Strikingly tender…a perfect summer book.’ Sydney Morning Herald.

About the book
At a suburban barbecue, a man slaps a child who is not his own. 

This event has a shocking ricochet effect on a group of people, mostly friends, who are directly or indirectly influenced by the event. 

In this remarkable novel, Christos Tsiolkas turns his unflinching and all-seeing eye onto that which connects us all: the modern family and domestic life in the twenty-first century. The Slap is told from the points of view of eight people who were present at the barbecue. The slap and its consequences force them all to question their own families and the way they live, their expectations, beliefs and desires.

The days are longer and the nights are balmy - it’s a great time of year to pack a picnic blanket, venture outdoors and indulge in some thrilling reads.

To chill out this summer we recommend Dame Stella Rimington’s intense spy tale Rip Tide. Directly inspired by her career of 27 years in MI5 and influenced by current threats to National Security, Stella Rimington has devised a plot that is fast paced and gripping. 

About the Novel

 When pirates attack a cargo ship off the Somalian coast and one of them is found to be a British-born Pakistani, alarm bells start ringing at London's Thames House. MI5 Intelligence Officer Liz Carlyle is brought in to establish how and why a young British Muslim could go missing from his well-to-do family in Birmingham and end up onboard a pirate skiff in the Indian Ocean, armed with a Kalashnikov. After an undercover operative connected to the case turns up dead in the shipping office of an NGO in Athens it looks like piracy may be the least of the Service's problems. Liz and her team must unravel the connections between Pakistan, Greece and Somalia, relying on their wits - and the judicious use of force - to get to the truth. And they don't have long, as trouble is brewing closer to home: the kind of explosive trouble that MI5 could do without ...