That Deadman Dance Winner

Well very excitingly, last night in Melbourne Kim Scott won the Miles Franklin prize.

This is his second time. His novel That Deadman Dance is the story of a Noongar man and his encounter with white people in the 1800's. Beautifully written and moving hooray for Kim Scott !!! In Stock now and only $22.99

July so many books, so little time.

Well what an exciting week there are loads of great books coming out for July but 3 of my very favourites are, in no particular order, To Be Sung Underwater -Tom McNeal, There Should be More Dancing by Melbourne Author Rosalie Ham and State of Wonder- Ann Patchett. There are so many others and yesterday I just finished Alan Hollinghurst’s latest great novel The Stranger’s Child . I have never read this Booker prize writer before and I totally loved this big history of the aristocratic, minor poet Cecil Valance, his family and all of the secrets that lay below the veneer of respectability. Smashing. Alan Hollinghurst’s other books are now on my ‘definitely to be read once I retire and have time book shelf’. Really this is just a tiny sample July is a jolly good month old girl.

Volcanic Ash and other blurring of sightlines

Well when I am feeling ill, and frankly who does’t this cold, cold winter , I love to lay in bed eat soup drink hot lemon drinks and read something incredible. Well last week I was doing that very thing when I opened an advance copy of The Rules of Civility by Amor Towles it was fantastic perhaps one of my fave US titles this year. I can’t wait till August when it is in the shop and some of you can share in the thrill of Katey Kontent’s life and times. I did read this in a real live book form and not as an electronic book,which is just as well as lentil soup and screens do not mix. I must be a bit old fashioned but reading a whole book from a screen just feels like work to me. Speaking of the rules of civility, I do not think that Nick Sherry was very civil when proclaiming the demise of the bookstore. I for one love bookshops, of course I am in one nearly everyday, speaking with customers and learning all the time from face to face interactions. We will have to celebrate if we are still in the hood in 5 years time and I do hope that Village Idiom is still there and Maritas of Yarraville and Plump and and and...

Picking a Winner!

As the announcement of the Miles Franklin Award for 2011 draws near (22 June) I have a confession to make. I just read last year’s winner ‘ Truth’ by Peter Temple and am asking myself why I left it so long! What a fantastic read and reading current headlines about the dramas surrounding the Victoria Police you get the feeling it really could be the ‘truth’. Other great award winning books I’ve read of late are the Pulitizer Prize winning ‘A Visit to the Goon Squad’ by Jennifer Egan, the Vogel winner ‘The Roving Party’ by Rohan Wilson and Hugo and Nebula award winning sci-fi novel ‘The Windup Girl’ by Paolo Bacigalupi. All very different books but really great reads, so reading the award winners is really paying off.

Michelle

All is very exciting here at the Sun Bookshop if you are one of the many who was after the Betty Churcher bookNotebooks then dash on in because it is back in stock hooray! We are deciding on what cheese to have with our glass of wine when Jane Clifton comes down on Wednesday I just like a plain old Wanganui from Curds and Whey at the Vic Market it is a delicious and very tasty cheese from New Zealand, whilst some are pumping for a milder cheese hmmn maybe both! I have been reading reading reading and was hit by the idea that Michael Koryta is actually very Stephen King he started off as crime but a supernatural element began creeping in with So Cold the River anyway his last two books Cypress House and The Ridge (due September) have continued the whole supernatural thing. I really enjoy these books, well written page turners anyway I am now going to shelve them in fiction. So for Stephen King fans I say give them a go

Nostalgic for Cake?

Whether you made them for your children, or had them made for you when you were a kid...

We think everyone needs a copy of this Vintage Edition of the Australian Women's Weekly Children's Birthday Cake book.

You could make the jelly-filled pool! The dolly cake, the spaceship - maybe even the castle or the train!! The possibilities are practically endless, and topped with hundreds and thousands and jubes. Delish!

June New Releases

The Life: A Novel, Malcolm Knox : Allen & Unwin
He looked into the Pacific and the Pacific looked back into him. The Life tells the story of former-world-champion Australian surfer, Dennis Keith, from inside the very heart of the fame and madness that is 'The Life'. Now bloated and paranoid, former Australian surfing legend Dennis Keith is holed up in his mother's retirement village, shuffling to the shop for a Pine-Lime Splice every day, barely existing behind his aviator sunnies and crazy OCD rules, and trying not to think about the waves he'd made his own and the breaks he once ruled like a god. Years before he'd been robbed of the world title that had his name on it - and then drugs, his brother, and the disappearance and murder of his girlfriend and had done the rest. Out of the blue, a young would-be biographer comes knocking and stirs up memories Dennis thought he'd buried. It takes Dennis a while to realise that she's not there to write his story at all. Daring, ambitious, dazzling, The Life is also as real as it gets - a searing, beautiful novel about fame and ambition and the price that must sometimes be paid for reaching too high.

The Amateur Science of Love, Craig Sherborne : Text Publishing
They say we fall in love. But really we fall in sickness. I lost appetite for food in those two nights with Tilda. My stomach was sunken in its wishbone cavity. Me, I was never sick, but I was sick now, the strangest sickness that made my eyes gleam green with excellent health. They had shiny white edges. My cheeks were glossed in a fresh oil of pink. Colin dreams of escaping his parents’ New Zealand farm for a grand stage career. He makes it to London and a disastrous audition before meeting Tilda—beautiful Tilda, older, an artist—who brings his future with her. A heady romance leads to a new home in a decaying former bank in a small town hours from Melbourne. They are building a life together—but there are cracks in the foundation. This is a love story, told from passionate beginning to spectacular end. It is intimate and honest, blackly funny and emotionally devastating.

Parisians, Graham Robb : Picador

New Format
The Sunday Times Top Ten Bestseller from the award-winning author of The Discovery of France. No-one knows a city like the people who live there – so who better to relate the history of Paris than its inhabitants through the ages? Taking us from 1750 to the new millennium, Graham Robb's Parisians is at once a book to read from cover to cover, to lose yourself in, to dip in and out of at leisure, and a book to return to again and again – rather like the city itself, in fact.

See more new releases on our website.