We are pleased to announce our November Avenue Book Club Book of the Month, is Wandering Through Life by Donna Leon
Each monthly title selected by our Avenue Bookstore customer service team, will be available for purchase with Double Frequent Buyer points during the listed month.
In addition, any local Book Club can register an Avenue Bookstore Frequent Buyer Book Club membership. Just mention when purchasing your book that it is for your book club to receive Double Frequent Buyer points.
Ask in store for further details.
November Book Club Book of the Month
From a childhood in the company of her New Jersey family, with frequent visits to her grandfather's farm and its beloved animals and summers spent selling homegrown tomatoes by the roadside, Donna Leon has long been open to adventure.
In 1976, she made the spontaneous decision to teach English in Iran, before finding herself swept up in the early days of the 1979 Revolution. After teaching stints in China and Saudi Arabia, she finally landed in Venice. Leon vividly animates her decades-long love affair with Italy, from her first magical dinner when serving as a "chaperone" to a friend, to the hunt for the perfect cappuccino, to the warfare tactics of grandmothers doing their grocery shopping at the Rialto Market.
Some things remain constant throughout the decades- her adoration of opera, especially Handel's vocal music, her advocacy for the environment and her eager imagination for crime as she watches unsuspecting travellers on trains. Having recently celebrated her eightieth birthday, Leon now confronts the dual challenges and pleasures of aging.
Complete with a brief letter dissuading those hoping to meet Guido Brunetti at the Questura, and always suffused with music, food, and her fierce sense of humour, Wandering Through Life offers Donna Leon at her most personal.
October Book Club Book of the Month
From the author of Skippy Dies comes a dazzlingly intricate and poignant tragicomedy about family, fortune, and the struggle to be a good man at the end of the world.
The Barnes family is in trouble. Dickie's car business is going under, but instead of doing anything about it, he's out in the woods preparing for the actual end of the world. Meanwhile his wife Imelda is selling off her jewellery on eBay and half-heartedly dodging the attentions of fast-talking local wrongun Big Mike. Their teenage daughter Cass, usually top of her class, seems determined to drink her way through the whole thing. And twelve year old PJ is spending more and more time on video game forums, where he's met a friendly boy named Ethan who never turns his camera on and wants PJ to run away from home.
Digging down through layers of family history, the roots of this crisis stretch deep into the past. Meanwhile in the present, the fault lines keep spreading, ghosts slipping in through the cracks, and every step brings the Barneses closer to a fatal precipice. When the moment of reckoning finally arrives, all four of them must decide how far they're willing to go to save the family, and whether - if the story's already been written - there's still time to give it a happy ending...
Paul Murray has previously been longlisted for the Booker Prize for Skippy Dies, and now The Bee Sting has been shortlisted for this year's Booker Prize.
September Book Club Book of the Month
A sweeping novel about the transformation of a single house in the woods of New England, told through the lives of those who inhabited it across the centuries.
When a pair of young lovers abscond from a Puritan colony, little do they know that their humble cabin in the woods will become the home of an extraordinary succession of human and inhuman characters alike. An English soldier, destined for glory, abandons the battlefields of the New World to devote himself to apples. A pair of spinster twins navigate war and famine, envy and desire. A crime reporter unearths a mass grave - only to discover that the ancient trees refuse to give up their secrets. A lovelorn painter, a sinister conman, a stalking panther, a lusty beetle: as each inhabitant confronts the wonder and mystery around them, they begin to realize that the dark, raucous, beautiful past is very much alive.
In his transcendent fourth novel, Pulitzer Prize finalist Daniel Mason delivers a magisterial and highly inventive tale brimming with love and madness, humour and hope. Following the cycles of history, nature and even language, North Woods shows the myriad, magical ways in which we're connected to our environment, to history and to each other. This book is definitely going to be among the most popular and beloved novels of the year - we were completely swept up in its masterful narrative from the very first page.
August Book Club Book of the Month
Winner of the Miles Franklin Literary Award 2023, Chai Time at Cinnamon Gardens is sure to provoke some lively discussion. Writing in The Age, Jason Steger described it as a ‘trojan horse’ of a novel. He notes that 'Shankari Chandran has pulled a fast one. Her novel Chai Time at Cinnamon Gardens has the sort of title and cover that suggest readers are in for a gentle read about the funny old residents of an aged-care home. But readers are in for a surprise… (the book) addresses racism, the consequences of colonisation, the distortion of history and the traumas of the Sri Lankan civil war head on – all with the help of those funny old residents.'
Welcome to Cinnamon Gardens, a home for those who are lost and the stories they treasure. Cinnamon Gardens Nursing Home is nestled in the quiet suburb of Westgrove, Sydney - populated with residents with colourful histories, each with their own secrets, triumphs and failings. This is their safe place, an oasis of familiar delights - a beautiful garden, a busy kitchen and a bountiful recreation schedule.
But this ordinary neighbourhood is not without its prejudices. The serenity of Cinnamon Gardens is threatened by malignant forces more interested in what makes this refuge different rather than embracing the calm companionship that makes this place home to so many. As those who challenge the residents' existence make their stand against the nursing home with devastating consequences, our characters are forced to reckon with a country divided.
Chai Time at Cinnamon Gardens is about family and memory, community and race, but is ultimately a love letter to storytelling and how our stories shape who we are.
About the author
Shankari Chandran was raised in Canberra, Australia. She spent a decade in London, working as a lawyer in the social justice field. She eventually returned home to Australia, where she now lives with her husband, four children and their cavoodle puppy, Benji. In January 2017, she published her first book with Perera-Hussein, called Song of the Sun God. Her second book, The Barrier was published in 2017.
July Book Club Book of the Month
Looking for wonder and some reprieve from the everyday, Anna Funder slips into the pages of her hero George Orwell. As she watches him create his writing self, she tries to remember her own…
When she uncovers his forgotten wife, it’s a revelation. Eileen O’Shaughnessy’s literary brilliance shaped Orwell’s work and her practical nous saved his life. But why – and how – was she written out of the story?
Using newly discovered letters from Eileen to her best friend, Funder recreates the Orwells’ marriage, through the Spanish Civil War and WW II in London. As she rolls up the screen concealing Orwell’s private life she is led to question what it takes to be a writer – and what it is to be a wife.
Compelling and utterly original, Wifedom speaks to the unsung work of women everywhere today, while offering a breathtakingly intimate view of one of the most important literary marriages of the 20th century. It is a book that speaks to our present moment as much as it illuminates the past.
‘So, she will live writing the letters she did – six to her best friend, and three to her husband. I know where she was when she wrote them. I know that the dishes were frozen in the sink, that she was bleeding, that he was in bed with another woman – and she knew it. . . . I supply only what a film director would, directing an actor on set – the wiping of spectacles, the ash on the carpet, a cat pouring itself off her lap.’
Click on this link to read an interview with Anna Funder
https://www.penguin.com.au/qa/4058-wifedom
June Book Club Book of the Month
Summer is coming to a close on Long Island, and Alex is no longer welcome...One misstep at a dinner party and the older man she's been staying with dismisses her with a ride to the train station and a ticket back to the city. With few resources, but a gift for navigating the desires of others, Alex stays on the island. She drifts like a ghost through the gated driveways and sun-blasted dunes of a rarefied world, trailing destruction in her wake.
Taut, sensual and impossible to look away from, The Guest captures the latent heat and potential danger of a summer that could go either way for a young woman teetering on the edge.
About the author
Emma Cline is the Sunday Times and New York Times bestselling author of The Girls and the story collection Daddy. The Girls was a finalist for the Center for Fiction's First Novel Prize, the National Book Critics Circle John Leonard Award, and the Los Angeles Times Book Prize. It was a New York Times Editors' Choice and was the winner of the Shirley Jackson Award. Cline's stories have been published in The New Yorker, Granta, The Paris Review and The Best American Short Stories. She received the Plimpton Prize from The Paris Review and an O'Henry Award, and was chosen as one of Granta's Best Young American Novelists.
Praise for The Guest
The talented Ms. Cline . . . Her prose is drifty and wire-taut, easy on the eye, with an awful undertow of unease that never lets up. The pathology brilliantly observed by The Guest would not feel so edgy if it were not perilously close to an aspirational ideal - GEOFF DYER
Questions to Consider:
Discuss how the book explores ideas around being a guest – how is hospitality offered and received? How does Alex masquerade as a legitimate guest when she is often so unwelcome?
Alex creates chaos wherever she goes. Discuss how someone who is seemingly so perceptive and observant in social situations seems to have little self-awareness beyond the immediate need to survive.
In a recent interview, Cline discussed how she’s interested in the desire of the wealthy characters in the book to lead a life without friction, that everything is bountiful and tasteful and available. Discuss how the secondary characters like Nicholas and Lori are performing to maintain this false reality in a similar way to Alex when she was employed by Simon.
The Guest is written completely from Alex’s perspective and she is certainly an unsympathetic and unreliable narrator. In what ways do you think the story would have differed if the author had chosen to write it from multiple perspectives?
The ending is deliberately ambivalent, what are your theories?
There is recurrent imagery of mirrors and reflection throughout the novel. How does Alex’s perception of how she presents compare to how others see her?
May Book Club Book of the Month
A grandson tries to learn the family story. But what kind of story is it? Is it a prison memoir, about the grandfather imprisoned without charge or trial by a revolutionary government? Is it an oral history of the grandmother left behind to look after the children? Or is it a love story? A detective tale?
Moving from 1930s Hanoi through a series of never-ending wars and displacements to Saigon, Paris, Melbourne and Cambridge, Anam is a novel about memory and inheritance, colonialism and belonging, home and exile.
Anam blends fiction and essay, theory and everyday life to imagine that which has been repressed, left out, and forgotten. The grandson mines his family and personal stories to turn over ideas that resonate with all of us around place and home, legacy and expectation, ambition and sacrifice. As he sifts through letters, photographs, government documents and memories, he has his own family to think about: a partner and an infant daughter. Is there a way to remember the past that creates a future for them? Or does coming home always involve a certain amount of forgetting?
About the Author
André Dao is a Melbourne-based writer, editor and artist. His debut novel, Anam, won the 2021 Victorian Premier’s Literary Award for an Unpublished Manuscript. His writing has appeared in Meanjin, Sydney Review of Books, Griffith Review, The Monthly, The Lifted Brow, Cordite, The Saturday Paper, New Philosopher, Arena Magazine, Asia Literary Review and elsewhere.
His residencies and fellowships include an AsiaLink Arts Residency in Hanoi, an Emerging Writers Festival-Ubud Writers Festival Island to Island residency across Indonesia, and a Wheeler Centre Hotdesk Fellowship. In 2015 he was selected as one of Melbourne Writers Festival’s 30 Best Writers under 30.
He is the co-founder of Behind the Wire, the award-winning oral history project documenting the stories of the adults and children who have been detained by the Australian government after seeking asylum in Australia. His work for Behind the Wire includes a Quill award winning article for The Saturday Paper and the Walkley Award-winning podcast, The Messenger. He co-edited Behind the Wire’s collection of literary oral histories They Cannot Take the Sky.
He was previously the editor-in-chief of Right Now, an online human rights magazine. In recognition of that work he was a finalist for the Australian Human Rights Commission’s 2011 Young People’s Human Rights Medal. He is also a member of the Manus Recording Project Collective, whose work has been exhibited in the Ian Potter Museum of Art, Melbourne and the City Gallery, Wellington
April Book Club Book of the Month
What happens when you take your 85-year-old mother to live with you on a Greek island? A strikingly original, funny, and forensic examination of love and finding home from the author of From Where I Fell.
In life, as in myth, women are the ones who are supposed to stay home like Penelope, weaving at their looms, rather than leaving home like Odysseus. Meet eighty-five-year-old Barbara and her sixty-two-year-old writer–daughter Susan, who asked her mother—on a whim—if she wanted to accompany her to live on the Greek island of Kythera. What follows is a moving unravelling of the mother–daughter relationship told in irresistible prose.
Aphrodite's Breath is a strikingly original, funny and forensic examination of love and finding home, amid the stories of the people, olives and wonders of the birthplace of Aphrodite.
About the author
Susan Johnson's work has been longlisted for the Miles Franklin Literary Award, the Dublin IMPAC Literary Award and shortlisted for the Queensland Premier's Prize, the Voss Literary Prize, the Christina Stead Award, the National Biography Award and the Commonwealth Writers' Prize, among others.
Susan is the author of eleven books (two non-fiction books, On Beauty, Melbourne University Press; a memoir on motherhood, illness and writing, A Better Woman); and eight novels, published in Australia and in Europe, the UK and US. Her ninth novel, From Where I Fell, was published in 2021 and was shortlisted for the Voss Literary Award. She has lived in Hong Kong, Paris, London and most recently in Greece.
Questions to Consider
'I asked Mum if she might consider coming with me to live in Greece’ she wrote. Why not?’ her mother replied in a blink. “I’ll be close enough to heaven if my time is up.”
Why do you think Barbara agreed to go with Susan in the first place? Do you think Susan’s analysis of this decision tells the whole story?
Susan writes that they “were brave and foolish in equal measure”. How so? What could mother and daughter have done better to prepare them for their life on Kythera?
Some cultural assumptions about Greece are fulfilled in the memoir and others are upended. What did you presume life on Kythera would be like and what surprised you most?
Susan employs various literary techniques to put the reader on side, to subtly make us like her. What are some of these techniques, and did they work?
Barbara is a prickly, rather morose figure for much of the book. Do you think her portrayal is a fair one? How would the book be different if Barbara had written it?
”How do you turn an idea like the happy Greek Memoir into art when the whole project gets hijacked by the unforgiving grittiness of life?”
What kind of memoir do you think Susan imagined writing before she left for Kythera? In what ways is Aphrodite’s Breath better for embracing that grittiness?
The mother/daughter relationship is a fraught and complex one. What are some of the key areas of tension in Susan and Barbara’s relationship, and how does the author use these to deepen the travel memoir?
Is Susan a “good” daughter? Is Barbara a “good” mother? How does your opinion of this change over the course of the book?
Greek myth is central here, from the title onwards. What are some of the ways Johnson employs mythology and the island’s cultural history to bolster the memoir’s literary heft? Did this work for you, or would you have preferred her to stick to the purely personal?
There is always an ethical question at the heart of memoir: can we write at all about other people in our lives? Who gets to tell the story? Are there things you think the author should have excised or things she should have included? Is Aphrodite’s Breath ethical, and does this matter?
March Book Club Book of the Month
'There were no saints in any era, Tom knew, just good men and bad, and sometimes both in the one bottle.'
Retired policeman Tom Kettle is enjoying the quiet of his new home, a lean-to annexed to a white Victorian Castle in Dalkey overlooking the sea. For months he has barely seen a soul, but his peace is interrupted when two former colleagues turn up at his door to ask questions about a decades-old case. A traumatic case which Tom never quite came to terms with.
His peace is further disturbed by a young mother and family who move in next door, a woman on the run from her own troubles. And what of Tom's family, his wife June and their two children?
A beautiful, haunting novel, in which nothing is not quite what it seems, Old God's Time is about what we live through, what we live with, and what will survive of us. Questions to consider:
Tom both does and doesn’t remember significant things in Old God’s Time. To what extent is he an unreliable narrator? Is it important that we trust Tom?
Sebastian Barry uses time itself to confuse and unsettle the reader throughout the novel. How and why does he do this?
Catholicism, its influence and its failures, is a major theme of the book. Is Tom meant to be read as a religious figure, and if so whom? What do you think are Barry’s opinions on the Catholic Church in Ireland?
Old God’s Time is a book heaving with ghosts, with sightings and apparitions. How do you think Barry wants the reader to understand this aspect of the novel? Is Tom literally haunted?
One review noted that the book had elements of the Western genre, with Tom Kettle having sought to deliver a frontier style of justice. Do you agree? Did Tom do the ‘right thing’?
Sebastian Barry always uses a character from either the Dunne or McNulty families. In Old God’s Time, the minor character of the young woman with the abusive husband is a McNulty, and therefore a relative of major characters from previous Barry works. What do you think is the significance of this? What is the purpose of this subplot?
Tom’s mental faculties are deserting him in the novel. How does Barry depict this? Does it increase our sympathy for Tom? How are we supposed to understand the shooting at the novel’s conclusion? Is this a moment of atonement, as Tom claims? Or an hallucination? Could it be both?
About the author: Sebastian Barry was born in Dublin in 1955. The current Laureate for Irish Fiction, his novels have twice won the Costa Book of the Year award, the Independent Booksellers Award and the Walter Scott Prize. He had two consecutive novels shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize, A Long Long Way (2005) and the top ten bestseller The Secret Scripture (2008), and has also won the Kerry Group Irish Fiction Prize, the Irish Book Awards Novel of the Year and the James Tait Black Memorial Prize. He lives in County Wicklow. Praise for Old God's Time: 'Few can write like Sebastian Barry, there is a real thrill as each sentence unfolds. Old God's Time is a portrait of a good man facing the failings of his past. It is wonderfully alive because Barry is so attuned to the human condition, to the poetry in ordinary lives. Full of love and grief and heartache, this is an unforgettable novel from one of our finest writers.' - Douglas Stuart'His work reminds us how much we need these rare gifts of the natural storyteller.' - Tessa Hadley
'Barry is the laureate of empathy.' - Sunday Independent 'Sebastian Barry faces down the most challenging of subjects with an unflinching pen, using blood for ink. Yet at its heart, Old God's Time is also a love story, of two souls bonded by trauma. Narrated by a retired guard who begins to lose control of his fragile senses as his past clashes with the present, it is shocking, stunning and extraordinarily brave. Barry has once again written a character for the ages.' - Liz Nugent