Emily Paull

I can vaguely remember a time when buying a book meant reading it straight away.  Trips to Dymocks as a pre-teen usually involved a promise on the part of my mother that each of us kids (there are three of us, myself and a sister and a brother) could choose one book to take home.  Even then, telling me that I could only have one was a little bit like telling me I had to choose which one of my limbs I most wanted to keep because the rest were getting cut off.  A lot of thought went in to my choices and I have vivid memories of spending hours standing under the yellow light in the YA section of our local bookstore, which used to be in the back corner.  There weren't nearly so many supernatural books back then.  I remember being adamant that I wanted Sisterhood of the Travelling Pants one time, even though Mum said she'd heard bad things about it.  What bad things exactly?  I can't remember.  Maybe she thought it was too teenaged, too American, in th...

Whisky Charlie Foxtrot Annabel Smith ISBN :  9781922089144 Fremantle Press Well, I'm going to be recommending this one to anyone who is looking for a book to discuss at their book club this month.   Charlie Ferns and his twin brother Whisky (William) have been through a lot together.  They've grown up as two sides of the same coin- but in Charlie's eyes Whisky has always been the twin who has been better off.  Older, taller, cooler, Whisky is both the object of Charlie's admiration and his scorn.  And as Whisky spends the better part of the novel in a coma, Charlie's world view is the only one we see. Readers with siblings will identify with the feelings of inadequacy which accompany having attractive, talented and popular siblings and the effects that such thinking can have on family relationships.  The novel takes the situation and draws it to an extreme- what if the sibling that you've spent your whole life resenting could be taken away from...

Bring up the Bodies Hilary Mantel 9780007353583 Goodreads When I talk about new fiction with customers at the book store where I work, one thing that often comes up is the way that a lot of writers emulate the practice of watching television when they craft their stories.  To be more clear; the emphasis is on things that can be seen; the progression of action is cinematic; the action is large and episodic.  Hilary Mantel's latest novel is brilliant in that it evokes the lavish world of Showcases' The Tudors  while at the same time managing to be a complex, character driven literary work. When we left Thomas Cromwell at the end of Wolf Hall , he had successfully removed all impediments to the marriage of Henry the Eighth and Anne Boleyn- only to see before his eyes his master falling for the plain, chaste figure of Jane Seymour at the eponymous homestead.  Cromwell is a masterful character.  He is made up of the intricacies and minutiae that he deals ...