Oscar and Friends Booksellers - Bookshop Double Bay Sydney

The Children's Book - A S Byatt
Summertime - J M Coetzee
The Quickening Maze - Adam Foulds
How to Paint a Dead Man - Sarah Hall
The Wilderness - Samantha Harvey
Me Cheeta - James Lever
Wolf Hall - Hilary Mantel
The Glass Room - Simon Mawer
Not Untrue & Not Unkind - Ed O'Laughlin
Heliopolis - James Scudamore
Brooklyn - Colm Toibin
Love and Summer - William Trevor
The Little Stranger - Sarah Waters

"On Thursday 18 June at a gala dinner held at the State Library of New South Wales. Tim Winton was announced as the 2009 winner for his novel Breath."

"It is twenty-five years ago when Tim won his first Miles Franklin Literary Award for Shallows. This year's win means that he is the only writer ever to have won four times in his own right."

When paramedic Bruce Pike is called out to deal with another teenage adventure gone wrong, he knows better than his partner - better than the parents - what happened and how. Thirty years before, that dead boy could have been him.

'This year's Orange Prize winner has a luminous quality to it that has drawn all of the judges to a unanimous decision. The profound nature of the writing stood out, as has the ability of writer to draw the reader into a world of hope expectation, misunderstanding, love and kindness.' Fi Glover, chair of judges

Jack – prodigal son of the Broughton family, godson and namesake of John Ames (main protagonist of Robinson’s previous novel), gone twenty years, has returned home looking for refuge and to try to make peace with a past littered with trouble and pain. A bad boy from childhood, an alcoholic who cannot hold down a job, Jack is perpetually at odds with his surroundings and with his traditionalist father, though he remains Broughton’s most beloved child.

His sister Glory has also returned to Gilead, fleeing her own mistakes, to care for their dying father. Brilliant, loveable, wayward, Jack forges an intense new bond with Glory and engages painfully with his father and his father’s old friend, John Ames.

Olive Kitteridge might be described by some as a battle axe or as brilliantly pushy, by others as the kindest person they had ever met. Olive herself has always been certain that she is 100% correct about everything -- although, lately, her certitude has been shaken.

This indomitable character appears at the centre of these narratives that comprise Olive Kitteridge. In each of them, we watch Olive, a retired schoolteacher, as she struggles to make sense of the changes in her life and the lives of those around her -- always with brutal honesty, if sometimes painfully. Olive will make you laugh, nod in recognition, as well as wince in pain or shed a tear or two. We meet her stoic husband, bound to her in a marriage both broken and strong, and her own son, tyrannised by Olive's overbearing sensitivities. The reader comes away, amazed by this author's ability to conjure this formidable heroine and her deep humanity that infiltrates every page.