Wednesday 30 September 2009

Wonders of a Godless World


Miles Franklin-winner Andrew McGahan's new novel Wonders of a Godless World will be offically published tomorrow. Allen & Unwin have prepared a book "trailer" which you can view here.

Friday 25 September 2009

From the people who brought you the OED...


Oxford University Press has produced the perfect companion to the Oxford English Dictionary. More than 40 years in the making, the Historical Thesaurus of the Oxford English Dictionary contains almost 800,000 meanings organised into more than 236,000 categories and subcategories.

It was produced by a team at the English Language Department of the University of Glasgow, and apparently one member of the team has been there from day one!

Volume 1 contains the thesaurus, which follows a unique thematic system of classification, with entries arranged in a comprehensive semantic hierarchy according to their meanings and volume 2 is the alphabetical index listing all the synonyms in Volume 1.

Stock is due in November and it will be available at the introductory price of $550 (usually $595). Click here to learn more about this superb publication and reserve your copy.

Wednesday 16 September 2009

The Science Book of the Year is Announced


Richard Holmes' The Age of Wonder has been chosen as the winner of the 2009 Royal Society Prize for Science Books. We currently have the hardback in stock. The paperback is due in November.


In The Age of Wonder Richard Holmes investigates how a fascination for science swept across Britain at the end of 18th century, using the stories of the scientists involved to engage the reader. The book covers a variety of disciplines including astronomy, chemistry, botany, philosophy, and even poetry, as it explores how the science of the time evolved.


The other five shortlisted titles were:

What the Nose Knows: The Science of Scent in Everyday Life by Avery Gilbert

Bad Science by Ben Goldacre

Decoding the Heavens: Solving the Mystery of the World's First Computer by Jo Marchant

The Drunkard's Walk: How Randomness Rules our Lives by Leonard Mlodinow

Your Inner Fish: The Amazing Discovery of our 375-million-year-old Ancestor.

Tuesday 15 September 2009

The Lost Symbol has been found at Abbey's


Today was the first day we were able to sell Dan Brown's new thriller The Lost Symbol. The response to this long-awaited follow-up to The Da Vinci Code has been great!

We are of course also providing a free copy of Mo Hayder's Ritual which usually sells for $21.95, as well as taking $10 off the recommended retail price of $49.95 of The Lost Symbol, so it's no wonder we are selling so many copies.

It appears that The New York Times couldn't wait to tell everyone about The Lost Symbol so they broke the worldwide embargo and published a review yesterday. You can read it here.

Our next big release is only two weeks away, on 1st October. It's The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet's Nest, the final volume in Stieg Larsson's spectacularly successful Millennium series.

Tuesday 8 September 2009

Awards News

The six shortlisted titles for this years Man Booker Prize for Fiction have been announced. They are:
The Children's Book by A S Byatt
Summertime by J M Coetzee
The Quickening Maze by Adam Fould
Wolf Hall by Hilary Mantel
The Glass Room by Simon Mawer
The Little Stranger by Sarah Waters
The winner will be announced on October 6th.

Scottish author Philip Kerr has won the world's most lucrative crime fiction prize, the RBA international prize for crime writing, for his novel If the Dead Rise Not. Kerr's book beat more than 160 others to land the €125,000 (A$209,500) prize. The book is the last in his series of 'Berlin noir' novels featuring detective Bernie Gunther, and covering a period that includes Hitler's rise to power and postwar Germany's struggle to come to terms with its past. The author said he was surprised at the size of the prize: "I recently got a prize in France which was a few bottles of wine."

A Beautiful Place To Die, the debut novel by Sydney-based filmmaker turned crime writer, Malla Nunn, has won Sisters in Crime’s Davitt Awards for the best (adult) crime novel by an Australian woman in 2008.

Tuesday 1 September 2009

2009 Ned Kelly Award Winners Announced

The winners of the 2009 Ned Kelly Awards, presented by the Crime Writers Association of Australia were announced last Friday. The joint winners of the Fiction Award were Peter Corris for Deep Water and Kel Robertson for Smoke & Mirrors.



The Non-Fiction Award went to Chloe Hooper for The Tall Man and Nick Gadd won the First Fiction Award for Ghostlines.


Shane Maloney was given a lifetime achievement award.