Oscar and Friends Booksellers - Bookshop Double Bay Sydney

 Jack Rosenblum is five foot three and a half inches of sheer tenacity. Through study and application he intends to become a Very English Gentleman. Jack is compiling a list, a comprehensive guide to the manners, customs and habits of his new home. And he never speaks German, apart from the occasional curse. Assimilation, he's convinced, is the secret of success.But the war's been over for eight years and despite his best efforts, his bid to blend in remains fraught with unexpected hurdles. Including his wife. Sadie finds his obsession baffling. She doesn't want to forget who they are or where they come from. She'd rather bake cakes to remember the people they left behind than worry about how to play bridge.But Jack is convinced they can find a place to call home. In a final attempt to complete his list, he leads a reluctant Sadie into the English countryside. Here, in a land of woolly pigs, bluebells and jitterbug cider, they embark on an impossible task...

Judd Foxman returns home early to find his wife in bed with his boss - in the act. He now faces the twin threats of both divorce and unemployment. His misery is compounded further with the sudden death of his father. He is then asked to come and 'sit Shiva' for his newly deceased parent with his angry, screwed up and somewhat estranged brothers and sisters in his childhood home. It is there he must confront who he really is and - more importantly - who he can become. Funny, moving, powerful and poignant.

In the middle of a desert somewhere south of nowhere, to a forlorn house made of metal and clapboard, a secret war advisor has gone in search of space and time. Richard Elster, 73, was a scholar – an outsider – when he was called to a meeting with government war planners. They asked Elster to conceptualise their efforts – to form an intellectual framework for their troop deployments, counterinsurgency, orders for rendition. For two years he read their classified documents and attended secret meetings. He was to map the reality these men were trying to create. Bulk and swagger, he called it.

At the end of his service, Elster retreats to the desert, where he is joined by a young filmmaker intent on documenting his experience. Jim Finley wants to make a one-take film, Elster its single character – Just a man against a wall.

The two men sit on the deck, drinking and talking. Finley makes the case for his film. Weeks go by. And then Elster's daughter Jessie visits – an otherworldly woman from New York – who dramatically alters the dynamic of the story. When a devastating event follows, all the men's talk, the accumulated meaning of conversation and isolation, is thrown into question. What is left is loss, fierce and incomprehensible. Point Omega is a deeply unnerving and brilliant work from one of our greatest living writers.

Malcolm Fraser is one of the least known, most interesting and possibly most misunderstood of Australia's Prime Ministers. In this book, part memoir and part authorised biography, Fraser, at the age of 79, explains himself and his record in government for the first time, speaking from his experience to the present and the future.

Written in collaboration with journalist Margaret Simons, the book traces the story of a shy boy who was raised to be seen and not heard, yet grew to become one of the most persistent, insistent and controversial political voices of our times. From the Vietnam War to the Dismissal and his years as Prime Minister, through to his many disputes with the Howard Government, Fraser emerges as an enduring liberal, constantly reinterpreting core values to meet the needs of changing times.

 Set among the hills and gorges of the Cevennes, the dark and beautiful heartland of southern France, Trespass is a thrilling novel about disputed territory, sibling love and devastating revenge.In a silent valley stands an isolated stone farmhouse, the Mas Lunel. Its owner is Aramon Lunel, an alcoholic so haunted by his violent past that hes become incapable of all meaningful action, letting his hunting dogs starve and his land go to ruin.Meanwhile, his sister, Audrun, alone in her modern bungalow within sight of the Mas Lunel, dreams of exacting retribution for the unspoken betrayals that have blighted her life.Into this closed Cevenol world comes Anthony Verey, a wealthy but disillusioned antiques dealer from London. Now in his sixties, Anthony hopes to remake his life in France, and he begins looking at properties in the region. From the moment he arrives at the Mas Lunel, a frightening and unstoppable series of consequences is set in motion. Two worlds and two cultures collide. Ancient boundaries are crossed, taboos are broken, a violent crime is committed. And all the time the Cevennes hills remain as cruel and seductive as ever, unforgettably captured in this powerful and unsettling novel, which reveals yet another dimension to Rose Tremains extraordinary imagination.

Major Ernest Pettigrew (retired) leads a quiet life in the small rural English village of Edgecombe St Mary where he values the proper things that Englishmen have treasured for generations - honour, duty, decorum and a properly brewed cup of tea. The Major takes pleasure in his well-organised and rational life until he finds out that his patronising son, and the kind yet interfering ladies of the village, seem to have their own, rather special plans for him.
It takes news of his brother's death, though, to open the Major's eyes to Mrs Jasmina Ali, the village shopkeeper, and confound all those carefully laid plans. Drawn together by their shared love of literature and the loss of their respective spouses, the Major and Mrs Ali soon find their friendship blossoming into something more. But although the Major was actually born in Lahore, and Mrs Ali in Cambridge, village society insists on embracing him as the quintessential local and her as a permanent foreigner.
A most unlikely hero, Major Pettigrew finds himself contending with irate relatives and an outraged village before he comes to understand his own heart.
Written with warmth, feeling and a delightfully dry sense of humour, this very modern love story will have you cheering wildly for the Major and Mrs Ali and believing that sometimes life does give you a second chance.

At nineteen, Jake Adelstein went to Japan in search of peace and tranquility. What he got was a life of crime … crime reporting, that is, at the prestigious Yomiuri Shinbun. For twelve years of eighty-hour work weeks, he covered the seedy side of Japan, where extortion, murder, human trafficking, and corruption are as familiar as ramen noodles and sake. But when his final scoop brought him face to face with Japan's most infamous yakuza boss — and the threat of death for him and his family — Adelstein decided to step down … momentarily. Then, he fought back.

 In Tokyo Vice, Adelstein tells a riveting, often humorous tale of his journey from an inexperienced cub reporter — who made rookie mistakes like getting in a martial-arts battle with a senior editor — to a daring, investigative journalist with a price on his head. With its vivid, visceral descriptions of crime in Japan and an exploration of the world of modern-day yakuza that even few Japanese ever see, Tokyo Vice is a fascination, and an education, from first to last.

The Imperfectionists tells stories about the peculiar people who write and read an international newspaper based in Rome: the obituary reporter who will do anything to avoid work, the Mideast correspondent who has no clue how to produce a news story, the grumpy editors at headquarters, the devoted subscribers aroudn the world, and the dog-obsessed publisher who seems less interested in his struggling newspaper than in his magnificent basset hound, Schopenhauer.

While the news of the day rushes past - war in Iraq, terrorism, the roller-coaster economy - the true front-page stories for all of them are the blunders and triumphs of their own lives.

The Imperfectionists touches on the fall of newspapers and the rise of technology but, above all, it is a moving novel about eleven unusual, endearing characters.

Summer 1970 a long, hot summer. In a castle in Italy, half a dozen young lives are afloat on the sea of change, trapped inside the history of the sexual revolution. The girls are acting like boys, and the boys are going on acting like boys, and Keith Nearing twenty years old, a literature student all clogged up with the English novel is struggling to twist feminism and the rise of women towards his own ends.The sexual revolution may have been a velvet revolution (in at least two senses), but it wasnt bloodless and now, in the twenty-first century, the year 1970 finally catches up with Keith Nearing.The Pregnant Widow is a comedy of manners and a nightmare, brilliant, haunting and gloriously risqu. It is the most eagerly anticipated novel of the year and Martin Amis at his fearless best.

Stripping Bare the Body shows at close hand how terrorism works and how war looks and smells and feels.  As a newly installed Haitian president told Mark Danner in riot-torn Port-au-Prince, 'Violence strips bare a society's body, the better to place the stethoscope and track the life beneath the skin.'  This stark truth came to haunt Danner, especially after the president was overthrown in a bloody coup d'etat.

Stripping Bare the Body moves from mass murder on election day in Port-au-Prince, to massacre by mortar bomb on the streets of Sarajevo, to suicide bombings in the suburbs of Baghdad, to torture in the secret 'black site' prisons of Thailand and Afghanistan, to political deal-making, personal rivalries and bureaucratic in-fighting in Washington and New York and Langley.  Here is the vivid, unforgettable history of what Mark Danner calls a 'grim age, still infused with the remnant perfume of imperial dreams.'