by Zia Haider Rahman
June 2014 | Picador | $29.99pb
This is a bold, epic debut novel set during the war and financial crisis that defined the beginning of our century. An investment banker approaching forty, his career collapsing and marriage unravelling, receives a surprise visitor at his West London townhouse. Confronting the dishevelled figure of a South Asian male carrying a backpack, the banker recognizes a long-lost college friend.
Zia Haider Rahman takes the reader on a journey ranging over Kabul, London, New York, Islamabad, Oxford, Princeton, and Sylhet, and dealing with love, philosophy, identity, finance, mathematics, cognitive science, literature, and war. Its framework is an age-old story: the friendship of two men and the betrayal of one by the other. Set against the breaking of nations and beneath the clouds of economic recession, the novel chronicles the lives of people carrying unshakeable legacies of class, culture, and faith as they struggle to tame their futures and as one man attempts to climb clear of his unfavourable beginnings.
by Brooke Davis
July 2014 | Hachette | $26.99pb
At seven years old, Millie Bird realises that everything is dying around her. She wasn't to know that after she had recorded twenty-seven assorted creatures in her Book of Dead Things her dad would be a 'dead thing', too. Her struggling mother leaves Millie in a local department store and never returns.
Agatha Pantha is eighty-two and has not left her house since her husband died seven years ago. She sits behind her front window, hidden by the curtains and ivy, and shouts at passers-by, roaring her anger at complete strangers. Until the day Agatha spies a young girl across the street. Karl the Touch Typist is eighty-seven when his son kisses him on the cheek before leaving him at the nursing home. He once used his fingers to type out love notes on his wife's skin. Now he types his words out into the air as he speaks. As he watches his son depart, Karl has a moment of clarity. He escapes the home and takes off in search of something different. Three lost people needing to be found, Millie, Agatha and Karl are about to break the rules and discover what living is all about. A series of events binds the three together on a road trip that takes them from the south coast of WA to Kalgoorlie and along the Nullarbor to the edge of the continent. Millie wants to find her mum. Karl wants to find out how to be a man. And Agatha just wants everything to go back to how it was. They will discover that old age is not the same as death, that the young can be wise, and that letting yourself experience sadness just might be the key to life. Highly recommended.
The Lie
by Hesh Kestin
July 2014 | Scribe | $27.99pb
Dahlia Barr does not suffer fools—or her own government, with which she is normally at odds. Shrewd, brash, and as tough as she is beautiful, the controversial Israeli attorney specializes in defending Palestinians accused of terrorism. She is also a devoted mother, a soon-to-be-divorced wife, and the lover of an American television correspondent. To Dahlia’s astonishment, the Israeli security establishment one day approaches her with a tantalizing proposition: Join us, and become the beleaguered nation’s arbiter on when to use the harshest of interrogation methods—what some would call torture. Dahlia is intrigued. She has no intention of permitting torture. Can she change the system from within? Then, as she settles into her new job, her son Ari, a twenty-year-old lieutenant in the Israel Defence Forces, is kidnapped by Hezbollah and whisked over the border to Lebanon. The one man who may hold the key to Ari’s rescue is locked in a cell in police headquarters. Edward Al-Masri—professor, activist, media gadfly—is an Arab who has a long and complicated history with Dahlia. And he’s not talking. Yet. The Lie is a nail-biting thriller, pulsing with insight into the inner workings of Israel’s security apparatus. It is a story of human beings whose lives turn out to share more in common than they—and the reader—could ever have imagined.
Close Call
by Stella Rimington
July 2014 | Bloomsbury | $29.99pb
In 2012, in a Middle Eastern souk, CIA agent Miles Brookhaven was attacked. At the time he was infiltrating rebel groups in the area. No one was certain if his cover had been blown or if the act was just an arbitrary attack on Westerners. Months later, the incident remains a mystery. Liz Carlyle and her Counter Terrorism unit in MI5 are assigned the task of watching the international under-the-counter arms trade. With the Arabic region in such a volatile state, the British Intelligence forces have become increasing concerned that extremist Al-Qaeda jihadis are building their power base ready to launch another attack. As the pressure mounts, Liz and her team must intercept illegal weapons before they get into the wrong hands. When MI5 learns that the source of the arms deals is located in Western Europe, Liz finds herself on a manhunt that leads her to Paris and Berlin and into her own long-forgotten past. A past buried so deep that she thought it would never resurface....
