Five Fall Titles: Books We’re Excited About this Autumn

Five Fall Titles: Books We’re Excited About this Autumn

Can you feel the dip in temperature? It’s officially fall, folks… or as we call it in Oz, autumn (that just doesn’t have the double-F ring to it). Either way, summer is done and we’re now looking at a completely new reading season. No more lying in front of the air-con with a summer blockbuster. No more sweating through a thriller on the way to work. It’s all about the trees turning all colours, wearing light layers, and looking forward to these books that are due out this season. Here are a few titles we’re really excited about.

The first big release of the season was The Mirror & the Light which was released this week. With The Mirror and the Light, Hilary Mantel brings the trilogy to a triumphant close. She traces the final years of Thomas Cromwell, offering a defining portrait of predator and prey, of a ferocious contest between present and past, between royal will and a common man’s vision: of a modern nation making itself through conflict, passion and courage. The Mirror and the Light is an astonishing achievement, exceptional in every way. It’s a masterpiece.

Next up, the book everyone is talking about, My Dark Vanessa by Kate Elizabeth Russell. Vanessa Wye was fifteen-years-old when she first had sex with her English teacher. It was love, she told herself. But Vanessa is now thirty-two and the teacher, Jacob Strane, has just been accused of sexual abuse by another former student. Nuanced, uncomfortable, bold and powerful, My Dark Vanessa goes straight to the heart of some of the most complex issues our age. It is not an easy story to read, but it is an important story to be told.

Julia Baird’s Phosphorescence is out late March. It’s a beautiful, intimate and inspiring investigation into how we can find and nurture within ourselves that essential quality of internal happiness – the ‘light within’ that Julia Baird calls ‘phosphorescence’ – which will sustain us even through the darkest times. Absorbing, achingly beautiful, inspiring and deeply moving, Julia Baird has written exactly the book we need for these times.

April brings one novel we’re really looking forward to: Gulliver’s Wife by Lauren Chater. When her husband is lost at sea, Mary Burton Gulliver, midwife and herbalist, is forced to rebuild her life without him. But three years later when Lemuel Gulliver is brought home, fevered and communicating only in riddles, her ordered world is turned upside down. And also The Dictionary of Lost Words, the first novel by Adelaide author Pip Williams, which was snapped up in fiercely competitive auctions after publishers converged on the Frankfurt Book Fair.

 

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                      Kate Elizabeth Russell
                      About the author

                      Kate Elizabeth Russell

                      Kate Elizabeth Russell is originally from eastern Maine. She holds a PhD in creative writing from the University of Kansas and an MFA from Indiana University. Her work has appeared in Hayden's Ferry Review, Mid-American Review, and Quarterly West, among other journals, and has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize. She currently lives in Madison, Wisconsin. This is her first novel.

                      Books by Kate Elizabeth Russell

                      Lauren Chater
                      About the author

                      Lauren Chater

                      Lauren Chater is the author of the bestselling historical novel The Lace Weaver and the baking compendium Well Read Cookies: Beautiful biscuits inspired by great literature. She is currently working on her third novel, The Winter Dress, inspired by a real 17th century gown found off the Dutch coast in 2014. In her spare time, she loves baking and listening to her children tell their own stories. She lives in Sydney.

                      Books by Lauren Chater

                      Julia Baird
                      About the author

                      Julia Baird

                      Julia Baird is a journalist, broadcaster and author based in Sydney, Australia. She is hosts The Drum on ABC TV and writes columns for the Sydney Morning Herald and the International New York Times. Her writing has appeared in a range of publications including Newsweek, The New York Times, The Philadelphia Inquirer, the Guardian, the Good Weekend, The Sydney Morning Herald, the Sun-Herald, The Monthly and Harper’s Bazaar.

                      Books by Julia Baird

                      Hilary Mantel
                      About the author

                      Hilary Mantel

                      Hilary Mantel is one of Britain's most accomplished, acclaimed and garlanded writers. Uniquely, her last two novels, Wolf Hall and its sequel Bring Up the Bodies, both won the Man Booker Prize for Fiction. She is is the first British author to have won two Booker prizes, the only woman to have done so and the only writer to have won with two consecutive novels. Sir Peter Stothard, Chair of the judges for the Man Booker Prize 2012, hailed her as 'the greatest modern English prose writer'. Wolf Hall is the most successful Booker winner since records began, selling over 200,000 copies in hardback, and 600,000 copies in paperback, in the UK alone.She was born in northern Derbyshire in 1952. She was educated at a convent school in Cheshire and went on to the LSE and Sheffield University, where she studied law. After university she was briefly a social worker in a geriatric hospital, and much later used her experiences in her novels Every Day is Mother's Day and Vacant Possession. In 1977 she went to live in Botswana with her husband, then a geologist. In 1982 they moved on to Jeddah in Saudi Arabia, where she would set her third novel, Eight Months on Ghazzah Street.Her first novel was published in 1985, and she returned to the UK the following year. In 1987 she was awarded the Shiva Naipaul Memorial Prize for travel writing, and became the film critic of the Spectator. Her fourth novel, Fludd, was awarded the Cheltenham Festival Prize, the Southern Arts Literature Prize, and the Winifred Holtby Prize. Her fifth novel, A Place of Greater Safety, won the Sunday Express Book of the Year Award.A Change of Climate, published in 1993, is the story of an East Anglian family, former missionaries, torn apart by conflicts generated in Southern Africa in the early years of Apartheid. An Experiment in Love, published in 1995, is a story about childhood and university life, set in London in 1970. It was awarded the Hawthornden Prize. Beyond Black, published in 2005, was shortlisted for the Orange Prize, while Wolf Hall won the 2009 Man Booker Prize, and Bring Up the Bodies, its sequel, won the 2012 Man Booker Prize. Hilary was also awarded a CBE in 2006. In 2014 she was made a Dame.She reviews widely for a range of newspapers and magazines, and is currently working on the sequel to Wolf Hall and Bring Up the Bodies, to be called The Mirror and the Light. A new short story collection, The Assassination of Margaret Thatcher, was published in 2014.

                      Books by Hilary Mantel

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