Fiction

In August 1875, Fanny Osbourne and her three young children travel from America to Europe, escaping an unhappy marriage.

Here's a congenial read that will draw you in and help make a wet weekend more tolerable.

Australian pastoralists and cattle barons have been popularly referred to as kings in grass castles.

Still Life with Bread Crumbs starts slowly.

Translated into English by Judith Landry, the futuristic God's Dog is set in an Italy that has become a ludicrous theocracy and almost a religious version of Orwell's 1984.

Elderly Dorrigo Evans, compulsive womaniser, husband, father, retired surgeon, lover of literature, WW2 veteran and reluctant war hero, is penning the foreword to a book of illustrations by a former fellow Australian POW, one of hundreds of thousands of men who died slaving to build the Thai-Burma railway under the Japanese 50 years earlier.

''As Great-Aunt Anna died, all the redcurrants in the garden turned white. The jelly they made had a mysteriously translucent shimmer. 'Preserved tears' grandmother called them. The jar from 1945, she gave to a museum, because those tears were too bitter.''

The breakout of Japanese prisoners of war in a camp in New South Wales in 1944 was a real event.

Four passengers, strangers to each other, find themselves travelling together in a train compartment from Edinburgh to London, and, quite unlike most other passengers in trains in Britain, start exchanging stories, stories about love, in particular, love at first sight.

Araminta Hall has written this story about two families and three generations of their mothers and daughters.

Jane Austen: Reimagined. The words on the back cover sum up what this book is about.

Birthright follows Banquo's Son and Blood Lines to complete the trilogy by Dunedin author T.K. Roxborogh, which is her take on what might have happened to Fleance, son of Banquo in Shakespeare's tragedy Macbeth.

It was like catching up with an old friend you haven't seen in decades and finding out they haven't changed a bit.

World War 1 stories are very current at present, as we approach the centenary of its fearsome beginnings.

This quiet offering from Zadie Smith is hardly the length of a novella, yet in its plot development and with its strong main character it reads as a succinct and gripping whole.

In this book, Wally Lamb writes of an apparently typical present-day, reasonably successful American family: father, mother, two daughters and a son.

It is not easy being a man, and it certainly isn't easy for Michael O'Dell, whose middle-class life spirals out of control after a car accident.

In this book, Faulks aims to introduce a new generation to the joys of reading Wodehouse by a kind of back-door method; that is, as an established modern author, he's thoroughly immersed himself in the Wodehouse style and produced a new ''Wodehouse'' title.

This was a pleasant surprise; reading the back cover, I mistook it as a thriller.

If this is a modern coming-of-age novel, I feel sorry for the younger generation.