Glenfield BookChats October 2009

With fugitive parents, a brother dodging loan sharks, a hunky cop who's made her outlaw family his business, and her ex-fiance back in the picture, Carlotta Wren thought her life couldn't get any more complicated. And then... Her fugitive parents phone home. Her identity is stolen by a look-alike. Her look-alike is found, well...dead. Under suspicion for murder, Carlotta discovers that her devious double might have been bumped off accidentally--and that she could be the real target! Throw in dealing with her motley crew of family, friends and wannabe lovers, and Carlotta begins to think that jail isn't such a bad alternative after all....

"Bunty McKenna's husband is having an affair. Even though she'd known they were growing apart, the realisation throws her into a panic. She has no skills. She has no money. The only thing she's ever done with any degree of success is be a wife and watch a lot of daytime TV. So Bunty decides she needs a new husband, a rich one, and enrolls with a high-class dating agency. There she meets several prospective partners, including one who ticks all the right boxes. When he disappears back to his native New Zealand, it makes absolute sense that she should follow him. Daughter and friend in tow, she boards the plane. But life is not like it is on telly. Soon Bunty discovers a whole lot about men, herself and the husband she's come to think of as Shrek."--Back cover.

While dealing with a sexy cop, her fugitive parents, a former fiancé, and a murder investigation, salesgirl Carlotta Wren gets dragged into a sordid new career when her brother, after getting in trouble with loan sharks and the law, takes a job moving bodies from crime scenes to the morgue.

"When Helen Mainyard was eight years old, her father suddenly uprooted the family from their home in Christchurch and settled them in Melbourne, Australia. Helen had always believed the move was her father's response to a vicious murder that happened in the city because, as she remembers, the murder affected 'everyone - all the people of Christchurch' in an unhappy way. But when she is twenty-one the real reason for the family's departure declares itself and causes Helen to re-visit scenes from her childhood, in particular a dark, brooding homestead called Amberley which, together with its climbing tree, had once held the inquisitive girl in its thrall. The remembered murder and the remembered house - both surreptitiously woven into her psyche, ultimately collide and together lead Helen to unearth a trail of human transgressions."--Back cover.

Raskolnikov, a destitute and desperate former student, commits a random murder without remorse or regret, imagining himself to be a great man far above moral law. But as he embarks on a dangerous cat-and-mouse game with a suspicious police investigator, his own conscience begins to torment him and he seeks sympathy and redemption from Sonya, a downtrodden prostitute.

Settler Elizabeth Bonner must cross the frozen wilderness of New York State in the winter of 1794 in a desperate bid to save her husband from being hanged as an American spy.

When Matthew Helen's lover of the past four years, finally decides to leave his wife Sophie (and their two daughters) and move into Helen's flat, she should be over the moon. The only trouble is, she doesn't want him any more. Now she has to figure out how to get ride of him.

This novel is set in Nigeria in the 1960s, at the time of a vicious civil war in which a million people died, and thousands were massacred in cold blood.The three main characters in the novel get swept up in the violence during these turbulent years. One is a young boy from a poor village who is employed at a university lecturer's house. The other is a young middle-class woman, Olanna, who has to confront the reality of the massacre of her relatives. And the other is a white man, a writer who lives in Nigeria for no clear reason, and who falls in love with Olanna's sister, a remote and enigmatic character. As these people's lives intersect, they have to question their own responses to the unfolding political events. This novel is about Africa in a wider sense: about moral responsibility, about the end of colonialism, about ethnic and tribal allegiances, about class and race; and the ways in which love can complicate all of these things.

Clara Casey has more than enough on her plate. Her daughters Adi and Linda were no problem at all during the usually turbulent teens. Now in their twenties, Adi is always fighting for or against something: the environment or the whale or battery farming; while Linda lurches from one unsatisfactory relationship to the next. As if this wasn't enough, Clara, a senior cardiac specialist, has a new job to cope with... For Anya, meeting Clara Casey is a miracle: she had never intended to leave her beloved Poland, but after the love of her life has turned sour, her world seems rather empty. Perhaps a new job in a new country will mend her broken heart? Declan is looking forward to joining the clinic - but the six-month posting brings him much more than he expected. Then there's Father Brian Flynn, who finds his doubts about his calling are assuaged by work in his new parish. But when an acquaintance turns into a nightmare he needs help to rescue his reputation...

A schoolmarm leaves England in 1792 to join her father and brother in a mountainous village in upstate New York, where she falls in love with a man torn between white and Native American culture.

Charlie Bone's life with his widowed mother and two grandmothers undergoes a dramatic change when he discovers that he can hear people in photographs talking.

Henry Park has spent his entire life trying to become a true Americana native speaker. But even as the essence of his adopted country continues to elude him, his Korean heritage seems to drift further and further away. Park's harsh Korean upbringing has taught him to hide his emotions, to remember everything he learns, and most of all to feel an overwhelming sense of alienation. In other words, it has shaped him as a natural spy. But the very attributes that help him to excel in his profession put a strain on his marriage to his American wife and stand in the way of his coming to terms with his young son's death. When he is assigned to spy on a rising Korean-American politician, his very identity is tested, and he must figure out who he is amid not only the conflicts within himself but also within the ethnic and political tensions of the New York City streets.

In 1996, Hanna Heath, a young Australian book conservator is called to analyse the famed Sarajevo Haggadah, a priceless six-hundred-year-old Jewish prayer book that has been salvaged from a destroyed Bosnian library. When Hanna discovers a series of artifacts in the centuries' old binding, she unwittingly exposes an international cover up.

"Further develops the structure [the author] explored in Opportunity. Characters from that book reappear, and new characters are added. The stories in Singularity cover a wide range of territory, from childhood innocence to adult desperation, from the depths of poverty to cushioned affluence, from London to Los Angeles, Ayers Rock to the black sand beaches of New Zealand's wild west coast. The stories can be read as discrete pieces, yet each also contributes to a unifying narrative." -- Back cover.

In this book, the fourth adventure in "The Edge Chronicles", Quint arrives in Sanctaphrax to help Liniu Pallitax carry out a series of important taks. He soons finds out how important they are when he and Maris, Linius' only daughter, are thrown into a terrifying adventure, finding themselves deep within the rock on which the city stands where they unwittingly release the curse of the gloamglozer.

Four years ago, Jonell McLain saw a diamond necklace in a jewellery store window. The necklace aroused desire first, then a provocative question: What if we shared what we desired? Several weeks, dozens of phone calls, and a leap of faith later, Jonell bought the necklace with twelve other women. With vastly dissimilar histories and lives, the women transcended their individual personalities and politics to join together in an uncommon journey. Part charm, part metaphor, part mirror, the necklace weaves in and out of each womans life, and comes to mean something dramatically different to each of them. What started as a quirky social experiment became something far richer and deeper, as the women transformed a symbol of exclusivity into a symbol of inclusiveness. They discovered that sharing the necklace was only the beginning: the more they shared with others, the more profound this experience became.

First published: London : H. Hamilton, 1971.

Mackenzie Allen Phillips' youngest daughter, Missy, has been abducted during a family vacation and evidence that she may have been brutally murdered is found in an abandoned shack deep in the Oregon wilderness. Four years later in the midst of his Great Sadness, Mack receives a suspicious note, apparently from God, inviting him back to that shack for a weekend. Against his better judgment he arrives at the shack on a wintry afternoon and walks back into his darkest nightmare. What he finds there will change Mack's world forever.

In Aramanth, exams are everything. When Kestrel rebels, her family are sentenced to the harshest punishment. To save them, Kestrel learns the secret of the wind singer and she sets out to discover the true source of the evil that grips Aramanth.

"Georgie Sinclair's husband has walked out; her sixteen-year-old son is busy surfing born-again websites; and all those overdue articles for Adhesives in the Modern World are getting her down. So when Georgie meets Mrs Shapiro - an eccentric old Jewish émigré neighbour - a firm friendship is formed over the reduced-price shelf at the supermarket. When Mrs Shapiro is admitted to hospital, to Georgie's surprise, she is named as her next of kin. But sorting out Mrs Shapiro's semi-derelict mansion, home also to seven stinky cats, is no easy job."--Publisher description.

Peter Godwin, an award-winning writer, is on assignment in Zululand when he is summoned by his mother to Zimbabwe, his birthplace. His father is seriously ill; she fears he is dying. Godwin finds his country, once a post-colonial success story, descending into a vortex of violence and racial hatred incited by an embattled dictator. His father recovers, but over the next few years, Godwin travels regularly between his family life in Manhattan and the increasing chaos of Zimbabwe, where inflation runs so fast that the currency can't keep up; where land seizures have made famine a real prospect; and where his parents, emigrants from post-war England, are refusing to abandon their home. It is against this backdrop that Godwin discovers a fifty-year-old family secret, one which changes everything he thought he knew about his father, and his own place in the world. 'When a crocodile eats the sun' is how some remote tribes explain the solar eclipse that coincides with Zimbabwe's torment; a celestial crocodile, they say, briefly consumes the life-giving star to demonstrate his displeasure with man below. In a land in which the forces of light are apparently giving way to those of the dark, it seems the very worst of omens. Peter Godwin's book combines vivid reportage, moving personal stories and revealing memoir, and traces his family's quest to belong in hostile lands - a quest that spans three continents and half a century.

Tracing the route of an ordinary pair of underpants from their purchase in New Zealand back to where they were made, Bennett has created a wonderfully funny and insightful look at the nature of global trade and the rise of the new China, the factory of the world.

Forensic anthropologist Dr David Hunter is on the remote Hebridean island of Runa to inspect a grisly discovery: a body almost totally incinerated but for the feet and a single hand. Could it be a textbook case of spontaneous human combustion? Then the power goes down, communication with the mainland ceases, and the killing begins in earnest.