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November 2011
 Blue Nights
by Joan Didion, TP, $34.99 It was with the expectation of infinite sadness I started Blue Nights. I don't like biographies, at least of the living, knowing so much, however biased, about someone leaves me arid. Yet 2005's The Year of Magical Thinking, its Spartan beauty, stark and essential pain, compelled me to read Blue Nights. It was meant to be about the death of Didion's daughter, Quintana Roo. It is about far more: Mortality and memory, the life left behind and the life departed. Can you assess the life, let alone the death, of someone vital to your existence? What spaces are left vacant in their passing? Death and mourning doesn't make for happy reading, but when difficult and piercing subject matter is written about with such skill and honesty it offers us a companionship and capacity for reflection that we can take with us into our own lives when we ourselves are confronted with pain and loss. How can I convince you that this is vital reading? This act of remembrance and re-visitation of experience, all reconsidered and weighed with a yearning, heartfelt intellectual struggle to understand, will tear and heal something in you. Didion has created, through an evocation of memory, an aching, hopeful revocation of mortality. It is an incantation, beautiful and staggeringly complete, of a life. The wonder of it is that, in the end, I didn't know whose: Didion's or her daughters. They are inseparable. View details | The Best American Series is the premier annual showcase for US short nonfiction and fiction, respected and loved by readers for over a decade. Each Volume's series' editor selects notable works from hundreds of magazines, journals, and websites. A special guest editor, a leading writer in the field, then chooses the best collection of pieces to publish. The result is an intriguing collection of books, always beautifully written, that offer up a year's worth of creative, in depth, fascinating prose.
| | | | | | The Best American Essays of 2011 brings together piercing writing about matters close to our lives. Informed, exceptionally argued and always riveting, the collected writers have followed their passions with their intellects to... | Reminisces, investigation and obsession rule these brilliant, blustering, curious pieces. Suffused with humour, obsession and reflection, this Non-Required Reading is anything but. | Collecting such names as Stephen Hawking, Atul Gawande, Malcolm Gladwell, Oliver Sacks and Jonathan Franzen, 2011's edition delves into deep space, the pathways and hidden corners... | Jennifer Egan, Chimanda Ngozi Adiche, Richard Powers, (the inimitable) George Saunders, Joyce Carol Oates... it goes on and on. A cavalcade of talent and creativity bringing... | Sports writing takes a heavy knock from the play by play, day to day newspaper scribes. The best sports writing takes inside a world & cultural experience that can be vital to our understanding of sports place... | $28.00 View details | $28.00 View details | $28.00 View details | $28.00 View details | $28.00 View details |  Steve Jobs: The Exclusive Biography
by Walter Isaacson, HB. Regular price $59.99, vicbooks' price $49.99 Based on more than forty exclusive and unprecedented interviews with Apple co-founder Steve Jobs - as well as interviews with more than a hundred family members‚ friends‚ adversaries‚ competitors‚ and colleagues - Walter Isaacson has written a riveting story of the roller-coaster life and intense personality of a creative entrepreneur whose passion for perfection and ferocious drive revolutionized six industries: personal computers‚ animated movies‚ music‚ phones‚ tablet computing‚ and digital publishing. His tale is instructive and cautionary‚ filled with lessons about innovation‚ character‚ leadership‚ and values. View details |  A More Perfect Heaven: How Copernicus Revolutionised the Cosmos
by Dava Sobel, HB, $39.99 During the 1530s, rumours of a potentially revolutionary theory of how the heavens worked emanating from a small city in Poland began to spread throughout Europe. The architect of this theory was a Polish cleric named Nicolaus Copernicus. In around 1514 Copernicus had written and hand-copied an initial outline of his heliocentric theory, in which he placed the Sun, not the Earth, at the centre of our universe, with the planets, including the Earth, revolving about it. Titled his Commentariolus, it circulated among a very few astronomers. Over the next two decades Copernicus expanded his theory through hundreds of sightings, leading to a secretive manuscript whose existence tantalised mathematicians and scientists all over the world. In 1539 a young German mathematician, Georg Joachim Rheticus, travelled to Frombork to meet Copernicus; months later he departed with the manuscript for the book that would change the way we understand our place in the universe. Rheticus arranged for the publication of De Revolutionibus Orbium Coelestium (On the Revolutions of the Celestial Spheres) - legend has it Copernicus received a copy on his deathbed. This book would forever change the way we thought about our place in the universe.
In her compelling style, Dava Sobel chronicles the history of the Copernican Revolution, relating the story of astronomy from Aristotle to the Middle Ages. And as she achieved with her international bestsellers Longitude and Galileo's Daughter, in A More Perfect Heaven, Sobel expands the bounds of popular science writing, giving us an unforgettable portrait of a major step forward in the human knowledge of our universe. View details |  The Magic of Reality: How We Know Whats Really True
by Richard Dawkins, illustrated by Dave McKean, HB, $55.00 What are things made of? What is the sun? Why is there night and day, winter and summer? Why do bad things happen? Are we alone? Throughout history people all over the world have invented stories to answer profound questions such as these. Have you heard the tale of how the sun hatched out of an emu's egg? Or what about the great catfish that carries the world on its back? Has anyone ever told you that earthquakes are caused by a sneezing giant? These fantastical myths are fun; but what is the real answer to such questions? The Magic of Reality, with its explanations of space, time, evolution and more, will inspire and amaze readers of all ages - young adults, adults, children, octogenarians. Teaming up with the renowned illustrator Dave McKean, Richard Dawkins answers all these questions and many more. In stunning words and pictures this book presents the real story of the world around us, taking us on an enthralling journey through scientific reality, and showing that it has an awe-inspiring beauty and thrilling magic which far exceed those of the ancient myths. We encounter rainbows, earthquakes, tsunamis, shooting stars, plants, animals, and an intriguing cast of characters in this extraordinary scientific voyage of discovery. Richard Dawkins and Dave McKean have created a dazzling celebration of our planet that will entertain and inform for years to come. View details |  A Little History of Philosophy
by Nigel Warburton, HB, $42.99 Philosophy begins with questions about the nature of reality and how we should live. These were the concerns of Socrates, who spent his days in the ancient Athenian marketplace asking awkward questions, disconcerting the people he met by showing them how little they genuinely understood. This engaging book introduces the great thinkers in Western philosophy and explores their most compelling ideas about the world and how best to live in it. In forty brief chapters, Nigel Warburton guides us on a chronological tour of the major ideas in the history of philosophy. He provides interesting and often quirky stories of the lives and deaths of thought-provoking philosophers from Socrates, who chose to die by hemlock poisoning rather than live on without the freedom to think for himself, to Peter Singer, who asks the disquieting philosophical and ethical questions that haunt our own times. Warburton not only makes philosophy accessible, he offers inspiration to think, argue, reason, and ask in the tradition of Socrates. A Little History of Philosophy presents the grand sweep of humanity's search for philosophical understanding and invites all to join in the discussion. View details | | |
 The Prague Cemetery
by Umberto Eco, TP, RRP $38.99 vicbooks's price $35 Umberto Eco's biggest book since The Name of the Rose - a brilliant historical novel, which has already sold over a million copies in Europe. Nineteenth-century Europe, from Turin to Prague to Paris, abounds with the ghastly and the mysterious. Conspiracies rule history. Jesuits plot against Freemasons. Italian priests are strangled with their own intestines. French criminals plan bombings by day and celebrate black masses by night. Every nation has its own secret service, perpetrating forgeries, plots, and massacres. From the unification of Italy to the Paris Commune to the Dreyfus Affair to the notorious forgery The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, Europe is in tumult and everyone needs a scapegoat. But what if, behind all of these conspiracies both real and imagined, lay just one man? What if that evil genius created the most infamous document of all? View details |  1Q84
by Haruki Murakami, HB, $55 It's already been called Murakami's magnum opus, as well as essential reading for anyone wanting to understand modern Japan, this stunning trilogy is available in one beautiful hardback. The year is 1984. Aomame sits in a taxi on the expressway in Tokyo. Her work is not the kind which can be discussed in public but she is in a hurry to carry out an assignment and, with the traffic at a stand-still, the driver proposes a solution. She agrees, but as a result of her actions starts to feel increasingly detached from the real world. She has been on a top-secret mission, and her next job will lead her to encounter the apparently superhuman founder of a religious cult. Meanwhile, Tengo is leading a nondescript life but wishes to become a writer. He inadvertently becomes involved in a strange affair surrounding a literary prize to which a mysterious seventeen-year-old girl has submitted her remarkable first novel. It seems to be based on her own experiences and moves readers in unusual ways. Can her story really be true? Both Aomame and Tengo notice that the world has grown strange; both realise that they are indispensable to each other. While their stories influence one another, at times by accident and at times intentionally, the two come closer and closer to intertwining. View details |  The Tiny Wife
by Andrew Kaufman, HB, $19.99 A magical short novel from the author of All My Friends are Superheroes. A robber charges into a bank with a loaded gun, but instead of taking any money he steals an item of sentimental value from each person. Once he has made his escape, strange things start to happen to the victims. A tattoo comes to life, a husband turns into a snowman, a baby starts to shit money. And Stacey Hinterland discovers that she's shrinking, a little every day, and there is seemingly nothing that she or her husband can do to reverse the process. Can Stacey and the other victims find a solution before it is too late? The Tiny Wife is a weird and wonderful modern fable. Small, but perfectly formed, it will charm, delight and unnerve in equal measure. View details |  A Cruel Bird Came to the Nest and Looked In
by Magnus Mills, TP, $36.99 'Comedy's blackest, funniest and most astute practitioner' - The Daily Telegraph Far away, in the ancient empire of Greater Fallowfields, things are falling apart. The imperial orchestra is presided over by a conductor who has never played a note, the clocks are changed constantly to ensure that the sun always sets at five o' clock, and the Astronomer Royal is only able to use the observatory telescope when he can find a sixpence to put in its slot. But while the kingdom drifts, awaiting the return of the young emperor, who has gone abroad and communicates only by penny post, a sinister and unfamiliar enemy is getting closer and closer... A Cruel Bird Came to the Nest and Looked In is Magnus Mills's most ambitious work to date. A surreal portrait of a world that, although strange and distant, contains rather too many similarities to our own for the alien not to become brilliantly familiar and disturbingly close to home. It is comic writing at its best - and it is Magnus Mills's most ambitious, enjoyable and rewarding novel to date. View details |  The Marriage Plot
by Jeffrey Eugenides, TP, $36.99 ‘A warm and beautifully written novel that illuminates the part of the human soul that even biology cannot reach' - Sunday Times From Jeffrey Eugenides, author of beloved novels Middlesex and The Virgin Suicides, a brilliant, funny and heartbreaking new novel about the glories and vicissitudes of young love. Madeleine Hanna was the dutiful English major who didn "t get the memo. While everyone else in the early 1980s was reading Derrida, she was happily absorbed with Jane Austen and George Eliot. Madeleine was the girl who dressed a little too nicely for the taste of her more Bohemian friends, the perfect girlfriend whose college love life, despite her good looks, hadn "t lived up to expectations. But now, in the spring of her final year, Madeleine has enrolled in a semiotics course to see what all the fuss is about ". And, for reasons that have nothing to do with her studies, life and literature will never be the same. Not after she falls in love with Leonard Morten “ charismatic loner and college Darwinist “ who is possessed of seemingly inexhaustible energy and introduces her to the ecstasies of immediate experience. And certainly not after Mitchell Grammaticus; devotee of Patti Smith and Thomas Merton; resurfaces in her life, obsessed with the idea that she will be his wife. The triangle at the heart of this novel is at once age-old and completely fresh and surprising. With brilliant wit, irony and an incredible understanding of and love for his characters, Jeffrey Eugenides captures the original energies of the novel while creating a story so contemporary that it reads like an intimate journal of our own lives. View details | 
Conqueror by Conn Iggulden, TP, $39.99 From a wise scholar to one of history's most powerful warriors, Conqueror tells the story of Kublai Khan - an extraordinary man who should be remembered alongside Julius Caesar, Alexander the Great and Napoleon Bonaparte as one of the greatest leaders the world has ever known. It should have been a golden age, with an empire to dwarf the lands won by the mighty Genghis Khan. Instead, the vast Mongol nation is slowly losing ground, swallowed whole by their most ancient enemy. A new generation has arisen, yet the long shadow of the Great Khan still hangs over them all... Kublai dreams of an empire stretching from sea to sea. But to build it, the new khan must first learn the art of war. He must take his nation's warriors to the ends of the known world. And when he is weary, when he is wounded, he must face his own brothers in bloody civil war. View details |  Cain
by Jose Saramago, TP, $32.99 Jose Saramago, the 1998 Nobel laureate, is dead. 20,000 people attended his funeral in Lisbon, Portugal last year; testament to his place in the minds and hearts of his people. His last work, which revisits the early themes of faith and religion first explored in the controversial and brilliant The Gospel According to Jesus Christ, is Cain; an irreverent, deeply felt look at the contradictions and inequities of the Old Testament, told through the eyes of the fratricidal Cain. Uncertain in time and place, Cain wanders the Earth experiencing God's creation and actions, trying to make sense of a quixotic deity. Funny, tender and fierce, this last work from the inimitable Saramago, with its brilliant recursive sentences and deep intelligence, is, in a comforting way, an answer to the claim that there are no atheists in foxholes, and a rebuttal to the idea that those without God lack a spiritual core. Saramago's death leaves a hole in modern literature, but his work will remain vital to readers for years to come. View details |
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