What’s new from Brio and the Booktopia Book Club?

Check out the latest and greatest titles from the Booktopia Book Club and Brio Books!

Booktopia Book Club Editions

The following two books are exclusive Booktopia Book Club editions, which means that they’re only $14.95 for Book Club members! Find out how to join here.

What the Boy Hears When the Girl Dreams

by Graeme Friedman

Twelve-year-old Finn wakes up one day with super-hearing. It gives him ‘dancing eyes’ and fainting spells, makes him the target of the school bully, and opens a window onto his parents’ failing marriage. At night he hears the dream-talk of Buseje, an asylum seeker who lives downstairs in the granny flat.

Finn begins to retrieve the fragmented stories which spill out while Buseje sleeps, helping her untangle the terrible mysteries of her childhood. But as Finn’s superpowers grow, he unwittingly unleashes ghosts from the past.

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Wood Green

by Sean Rabin

Michael, an aspiring writer who has recently finished his PhD, takes a job as the secretary to his literary hero, Lucian Clarke, a reclusive novelist with a mysterious cosmopolitan past, who lives in a cottage in a village on a mountain outside Hobart which gives the book its title, Wood Green. While Michael believes he is making a new life for himself, Lucian has other plans …

Peopled by an ensemble cast, the local publican, the single mother who manages the pub’s kitchen, the unhappily married couple that runs the corner store, a newcomer from Johannesburg with a murky past, a snivelling B&B proprietor and a determined ex-girlfriend, Wood Green artfully evokes the claustrophobia of small-town life.

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Brio Books

Back in May, Booktopia was thrilled to welcome stalwart Aussie publishing house Brio Books to our publishing division. Below you’ll find the latest titles from Brio Books!

Huckstepp: A Dangerous Life

by John Dale

A true crime classic, the bestselling Huckstepp investigates the murder of a charismatic woman who has fascinated Australians since she first appeared on national television to accuse NSW detectives of shooting her boyfriend in cold blood.

This is a true story, brilliantly told, of a courageous woman who spoke out against corruption and murder. Now revised and updated with a note from the author.

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Black Diamonds

by Kim Kelly

It’s 1914 and the coal town of Lithgow is booming. Daniel Ackerman is a serious young man, a miner, a socialist and German; Francine Connolly is the bourgeois, Irish-Catholic, too-good-for-this-place daughter of one of the mine owners. When a tragic accident forces them together, this class-crossed pair fall in love despite themselves.

Before the signatures on their marriage certificate are dry, though, war erupts, and a much more terrifying obstacle confronts them. Against his principles but driven by a sense of solidarity, Daniel enlists; Francine, horrified, has no choice but to watch him go.

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This Red Earth

by Kim Kelly

On the cusp of summer 1939, another war has begun in Europe. Bernie Cooper is wondering what might be in it for her; she’s looking for adventure, some way to stretch her wings. The boy next door, Gordon Brock, is wondering if Bernie will marry him – before he heads off on his own adventure, his first job as a geologist with an oil company in New Guinea.

But the war has plans for them both neither could have imagined in their wildest nightmares.

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The Blue Mile

by Kim Kelly

Broke and hopeless in 1929, Yo O’Keenan flees the violence of his home in Chippendale, and by some miracle charms his way into a job on the Harbour Bridge, a new start for himself and his little sister, Agnes. Meanwhile, on the north side of Sydney, in her cluttered cottage at Lavender Bay, a young and ambitious costumier, Olivia Greene, works on her latest millinery creations, dreaming of taking her colours to Paris, London, New York.

A random encounter in the Botanic Gardens sparks a powerful attraction, even as the gulf between this pair seems wider than the blue mile of harbour that divides the city.

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Paper Daisies

by Kim Kelly

At Christmas, 1900, university student Berylda Jones is heading home from Sydney to Bathurst, and with customary reluctance, for ‘home’ is where she and her sister Greta live in quiet terror, under the control of their sadistic Uncle Alec. Berylda has a plan this time, though, to free herself and Greta from Alec for good – if she can only find the courage to execute it.

On New Year’s Eve, that plan begins to take fire. Just as Alec tightens his grip on the sisters, a stranger arrives at their gate – Ben Wilberry, a botanist in search of a particular native wildflower, with his friend, the artist Cosmo Thompson.

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Wild Chicory

by Kim Kelly

Wild Chicory is a novella that takes the reader on an immigrant journey from Ireland to Australia in the early 1900s, along threads of love, family, war and peace. It’s a slice of ordinary life rich in history, folklore and fairy tale, and a portrait of the precious relationship between a granddaughter, Brigid, and her grandmother, Nell.

From the windswept, emerald coast of County Kerry, to the slums of Sydney’s Surry Hills; and from the bitter sectarian violence of Ulster, to tranquillity of rural New South Wales, Brigid weaves her grandmother’s tales into a small but beautiful epic of romance and tragedy, of laughter and the cold reality of loss. It’s Nell’s tales, tall and true, that spur Brigid to write her own, too.

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Jewel Sea

by Kim Kelly

March, 1912. A sultry Indian summer hangs over the west coast of Australia and aboard the luxury steamship SS Koombana, three tales entwine.

Irene Everley longs to leave her first-class fishbowl existence, secretly penning a gossip column as her life spirals out of control into soulless liaisons and alcohol, the long shadow of a tragedy clouding her view.

James Sinclair, an investor on his way to Broome is not the man he says he is but can he be trusted?

Abraham Davis, a wealthy dealer whose scandalous divorce is being dragged through the press, prepares to take the gamble of his life: to purchase an infamous, stolen pearl along the journey north.

Perfectly round, perfectly pink, this pearl comes with a curse and with a warning – destroying all who keep it from returning to the sea.

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Lady Bird & The Fox

by Kim Kelly

It’s 1868 and the gold rush is spreading across the wild west of New South Wales, bringing with it a new breed of colonial rogue – bushrangers. A world far removed from hardworking farm girl, Annie Bird, and her sleepy village on the outskirts of Sydney.

But when a cruel stroke of fortune sees Annie orphaned and outcast, she is forced to head for the goldfields in search of her grandfather, a legendary tracker. Determined and dangerously naive, she sets off with little but a swag full of hope – and is promptly robbed of it on the road.

Her cries for help attract another sort of rogue: Jem Fox, the waster son of a wealthy silversmith, who’s already in trouble with the law …

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Sunshine

by Kim Kelly

It’s 1921 and the Great War has left in its wake untold tragedy, not only in lives lost, but in the guilt of survivors, the deep-set scars of old wounds and the sting of redoubled bigotries.

In the tiny hamlet of Sunshine, on the far-flung desert’s edge, three very different ex-servicemen – Jack Bell, an Aboriginal horseman; Snow McGlynn, a laconic, curmudgeonly farmer; and Art Lovelee, an eccentric engineer – find themselves sharing a finger of farmland along the Darling River, and not much else. That is, until Art’s wife Grace, a battle-hardened nurse, gets to work on them all with her no-nonsense wisdom.

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Walking

by Kim Kelly

Sydney, 1948: Brilliant German surgeon, Hugo Winter, is dead, and his protege, Lucy Brynne, is tasked with sorting his papers. Among them, Lucy finds glimpses of Hugo’s past that paint a disturbing picture of war and prejudice – a portrait of Australia she can barely recognise.

Days later, an intriguing patient comes into her care on the orthopaedic ward at Sydney Hospital: one Mr Jim Cleary. Lucy’s experience as an army physiotherapist, as well as her own very personal knowledge of pain, tell her there’s more to this man’s fractured leg than meets the eye.

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Her Last Words

by Kim Kelly

Thisbe Chisholm wants to be a writer. It’s 2007, a time of digital revolution and skyrocketing property prices, but she’s an old-fashioned girl. She doesn’t even own a mobile phone. She has no stars-in-her-eyes desire for fame, to see her name on the cover of a book, either. She longs only to tell of the stories written on her heart.

While her best friends, Penny and Jane, and her darling boyfriend, John, seem set for stellar careers in their chosen fields, Thisbe works nights as a hostess at a glitzy harbourside Sydney club – a job she despises but it’s paid the rent for the last three years since university graduation.

Just as she completes her novel, though, she is brutally killed at the end of John’s street. Who murdered Thisbe? What will become of her novel?

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The Truth & Addy Loest

by Kim Kelly

Addy Loest is harbouring a secret – several, in fact. Dedicated overthinker, frockaholic and hard-partier, she’s been doing all she can to avoid the truth for quite some time.

A working-class girl raised between the Port Kembla Steelworks and the surf of the Illawarra coast, Addy is a fish out of water at the prestigious University of Sydney. She’s also the child of German immigrants, and her broken-hearted widower dad won’t tell her anything about her family’s tragic past.

But it’s 1985, a time of all kinds of excess, from big hair to big misogyny, and distractions are easy. Distractions, indeed, are Addy’s best skill – until one hangover too many leads her to meet a particular frock and a particular man, each of whom will bring all her truths hurtling home.

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Impostor Syndrome

by Kathy Wang

In 2006 Julia Lerner is living in Moscow, a recent university graduate in computer science, when she’s recruited by Russia’s largest intelligence agency. By 2018 she’s in Silicon Valley as COO of Tangerine, one of America’s most famous technology companies. In between her executive management (make offers to promising startups, crush them and copy their features if they refuse); self promotion (check out her latest op-ed in the WSJ, on Work/Life Balance 2.0); and work in gender equality (transfer the most annoying females from her team), she funnels intelligence back to the motherland. But now Russia’s asking for more, and Julia’s getting nervous.

Alice Lu is a first generation Chinese American whose parents are delighted she’s working at Tangerine (such a successful company!). Too bad she’s slogging away in the lower echelons, recently dumped, and now sharing her expensive two-bedroom apartment with her cousin Cheri, a perennial “founder’s girlfriend”. One afternoon, while performing a server check, Alice discovers some unusual activity …

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