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pick of the
week
HOUSEKEEPER AND THE PROFESSOR by OGAWA YOKO
He is a brilliant maths professor with a peculiar problem - ever since a traumatic head injury some seventeen years ago, he has lived with only eighty minutes of short-term memory.
She is a sensitive but astute young housekeeper with a ten-year-old son, who is entrusted to take care of him.
Each morning, as the Professor and the Housekeeper are reintroduced to one another, a strange, beautiful relationship blossoms between them. The Professor may not remember what he had for breakfast, but his mind is still alive with elegant equations from the past. He devises clever maths riddles - based on her shoe size or her birthday - and the numbers, in all of their articulate order, reveal a sheltering and poetic world to both the Housekeeper and her little boy. With each new equation, the three lost souls forge an affection more mysterious than imaginary numbers, and a bond that runs deeper than memory.
The Housekeeper and the Professor is an enchanting story about what it means to live in the present, and about the curious equations that can create a family where one before did not exist.
Our Price $30.99
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CIDER GUMS AND CURRAWONGS by HARDSTAFF GWEN
Writer Gwen Hardstaff spent much of her childhood at St Patricks Plains in Tasmanian’s Central Highlands. She has happy memories of a time when you made your own fun and learned to live close to and love the natural world. Gwen has assembled a plethora of information about the largely vanished life of the people of the high country – horsemen, shepherds, fur trappers, the people who constructed Tasmania’s revolutionary hydro-electric power schemes and the pioneers who preceded them in this at times tough but always beautiful part of Tasmania. And before Europeans there were the first Tasmanians: the Aboriginal people who for a thousand and more generations moved from coast to high country as the seasons dictated.
It would be easy to think of the plateau as a man’s world, yet women accompanied their menfolk from very early days. These women gave birth, raised families and battled loneliness. They also learned to love the high country with its burning summer sun and winter blizzards.
Gwen Hardstaff has assembled a wealth of photographs and other material and has used it to create a detailed history of the high country up until the 1950s, when the traditional lifestyle began to disappear as roads, cars and modern communications brought rapid and permanent change.
If you have a family connection to the Central Plateau or if you are a serious historian this is a book you will enjoy. It will come to be recognised as an important part of the Tasmanian historical record.
Our Price $65.00
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IN THE GARDEN WITH JANE AUSTEN by WILSON KIM
Jane Austen's natural world--real and fictional--comes to life in this colorful, illustrated stroll through the gardens, parks and great estates of Regency England. With lush photos, social history, excerpts from Austen's novels, biographical information, drawings and diagrams, this book brings the great outdoors to readers eager to understand more details of Austen's environment. Also featured are instructions on how to create your own English garden and on where to see sites mentioned in the book. Gardens from movie adaptations of her novels are included.
Our Price $36.99
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FROM FELON TO FREEDOM by PRIDMORE WALTER B
An historical novel of colonial Van Diemen's Land
From Felon to Freedom traces the lives of the men and women who, with great trepidation, landed on an unknown, alien shore and, through fortitude and courage, forged a new country.
Our Price $22.99
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MAP OF THE INVISIBLE WORLD by AW TASH
From the author of the internationally acclaimed, award-winning The Harmony Silk Factory comes an enthralling new novel that evokes an exotic yet turbulent and often frightening world. 16-year-old Adam is an orphan three times over. He and his older brother, Johan, were abandoned by their mother as children; he watched as Johan was adopted and taken away by a wealthy couple; and he had to hide when Karl, the Dutch man who raised him, was arrested by soldiers during Sukarno's drive to purge 1960s Indonesia of its colonial past.
Adam sets out on a quest to find Karl, but all he has to guide him are some old photos and letters, which send him to the colourful, dangerous capital, Jakarta. Johan, meanwhile, is living a seemingly carefree, privileged life in Malaysia, but is careering out of control, unable to forget the long-ago betrayal of his helpless, trusting brother.
Map of the Invisible World is a masterful novel, and confirms Tash Aw as one of the most exciting young writers at work today.
Our Price $30.99
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