On Beauty

Set in New England mainly and London partly, On Beauty concerns a pair of feuding families — the Belseys and the Kipps — and a clutch of doomed affairs. It puts low morals among high ideals and asks some searching questions about what life does to love. For the Belseys and the Kipps, the confusions — both personal and political — of our uncertain age are about to be brought close to home — right to the heart of family.

A Short History of Tractors...

For years, Nadezhda and Vera, two Ukrainian sisters, raised in England by their refugee parents, have had as little as possible to do with each other — and they have their reasons. But now they find they’d better learn how to get along, because since their mother’s death their ageing father has been sliding into his second childhood, and an alarming new woman has just entered his life. Valentina, a bosomy young synthetic blonde from the Ukraine, seems to think their father is much richer than he is, and she is keen that he leave this world with as little money to his name as possible. If Nadazhda and Vera don’t stop her, no one will. But separating their addled and annoyingly lecherous dad from his new love will prove to be no easy feat — Valentina is a ruthless pro and the two sisters realise they are mere amateurs when it comes to ruthlessness. As Hurricane Valentina turns the family house upside down, old secrets come falling out, including the most deeply buried one of them all, from the War, the one that explains much about why Nadazhda and Vera are so different. In the meantime, oblivious to it all, their father carries on with the great work of his dotage, a grand history of the tractor.

The Lost Daughter...

Narrated in a haunting voice that mulls over painful truths of the past, this is an unflinching, erotic tale of forbidden love in turn-of-the-century San Francisco. Fusang is a Chinese girl who is shanghaied from her village and brought to San Francisco, where she enters a seedy underworld.

The Bell Jar

Esther Greenwood is at college and is fighting two battles, one against her own desire for perfection in all things — grades, boyfriend, looks, career — and the other against remorseless mental illness. As her depression deepens, she finds herself encased in it, bell-jarred away from the rest of the world. This is the story of her journey back into reality. Highly readable, witty and disturbing, The Bell Jar is Sylvia Plath’s only novel and was originally published under a pseudonym in 1963. What it has to say about what women expect of themselves, and what society expects of women, is as sharply relevant today as it has always been.

Priestess of the White

When Auraya was chosen to become a priestess, she could never have believed that a mere 10 years later she would be one of the White, the gods’ most powerful servants. Sadly, Auraya has little time to adapt to the exceptional powers gifted her by the gods. Mysterious black-clad sorcerers from the south plague the land, and rumours reach the White of an army being raised. Auraya and her new colleagues work tirelessly to seal alliances and unite the northern continent under their banner, but time is running out. War comes to the lands of the White, and unless Auraya can master her new abilities, even the favour of the gods may not be enough to save them...Trudi Canavan, author of the bestselling Black Magician Trilogy, embarks upon a wonderful new fantasy series set in a classical world of magic, heroes, gods and forbidden love.

Blind justice

Lawyer Ben Kincaid has been fired from Tulsa’s law firm and is out on his own on the wrong side of town. His clients pay him with live chickens, and a divorce client’s ex-husband threatens him with a gun that shoots a flag saying “Boom.” Into this falls Christina McCall, an old friend, ace legal assistant at Ben’s former firm and prime suspect in the murder of Tony Lombardi, her ex-client and a suspected mob drug-runner. Everything is stacked against Ben and Christina: the presiding judge is Ben’s unfriendly ex-boss, and FBI agents are willing to use extra-legal means to obtain the evidence to convict Christina. Lawyer Bernhardt leavens this workmanlike drama with a variety of interesting characters — including Ben’s pawnbroker neighbour who sends him dead gophers in the mail.