September 2009 - The Boomerang Books Blog

The Lost Symbol Fever

The Lost Symbol sold 1 million copies worldwide in one day. While no-where near the numbers Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows raked in – 8 million in the US alone on Day 1 – there’s no doubting that Dan Brown’s latest is a hit. When a book has been as anticipated as this has, readers often find themselves at a loss after devouring it.

They need more.

Are you suffering from The Lost Symbol Fever / Withdrawals? Need your next conspiratorial fix? Well, check out these supplementary reads fresh off the press:

The Rough Guide to the Lost Symbol by Michael Haag
Dan Brown’s new thriller The Lost Symbol is the biggest global publishing phenomenon since his runaway bestseller The Da Vinci Code. The new adventures of mystery-solving Professor of Symbology, Robert Langdon have attracted huge global interest and fresh controversies concerning Dan Brown’s ideas, characters and thoughts on mythology and history.The Rough Guide to The Lost Symbol traces all the debates concerning religion and secret societies and the views of historians on Dan Brown’s plots and ideas. It casts an eye on the locations of the book and how you can visit them and explains how The Lost Symbol connects to Brown’s previous work and other books. Whether you are a Dan Brown fanatic, sceptic or agnostic there is no doubting the excitement generated by his exciting stories all of which are explored in this guide. This new Rough Guide has the key to understanding The Lost Symbol.

The Secrets of the Lost Symbol by Ian Gittins
Explores all aspects of the most talked about secret society in the world, from its most famous members to its infamous history, revealing the facts behind the fiction of Dan Brown’s new blockbuster. For centuries the Freemasonry has been the subject of rumour and intrigue. From its obscure origins to the suspicion that it exercises huge influence on government and multinational corporations, there has always been more than a whiff of controversy about the organisation. Secrets of the Lost Symbol reveals the truth behind the myths, sifts the facts from the fiction, and unveils the mysterious rites and ceremonies. Ian Gittins delves deep into the true origins of the society, its philosophy and practices, describes the rituals, and profiles a number of key figures. Along the way, he also shows where fact and fiction have fought, and fiction has won the battle.

Uncovering the Lost Symbol by Tim Collins
Delves into the mysteries Dan Brown writes about in his latest novel. The symbology behind the racy thriller will be unravelled and explained to all.

Boomerang @ Bookfeast 2009

Whenever William the author is invited to an event, William the Boomerang Blogger gets indirectly invited too. On Wednesday, NSW authors and illustrators braved the orange dust storm, and headed into the CBD for this year’s Bookfeast, a great event organised by Haberfield school librarian Michael Fraser.

Some Boomerang Books Blog alums were there, including Deborah Abela, Belinda Murrell, Richard Harland and Kate Forsyth. Also there was Susanne Gervay, whose I Am Jack’s stage adaptation by MonkeyBaa is on until October 2 at the Seymour Theatre and is the talk of the town, Duncan Ball, Sue Whiting, Jenny Hale, and my current favourite (and the insanely funny) illustrator Sarah Davies, who was just awarded Best New Young Illustrator by the CBCA for the powerful Mending Lucille.

Now, pictures!

Fictional jigsaw

Why did you use a metafictive style (calling attention to the constructedness of the story)? For example, Micah is an unreliable narrator, Micah addresses the reader …

Direct address is one of the oldest forms of storytelling. ‘Here, let me tell you a story …’ Many early novels are told that way. It’s really only in the 19th-century that you see it begin to fade away. I see Liar as a return to older storytelling. Unreliable narrators are also a fairly old device though I was a lot more upfront about Micah’s unreliablity than say Dickens is about his unreliable narrators. The book is called Liar and on the first page of the book Micah announces that she’s a liar. Can’t be clearer than that. You don’t have to figure it out the way you have to with Pip in Great Expectations.

Where did your over-arching theme of lies and truth spring from?

I think the very act of writing stories means you have to deal with what’s true and what’s not and with the many different levels of truth. My book is very true to what it’s like to deal with the death of someone you loved, what it’s like to come from a family that does not function normally, what it’s like to grow up having to keep secrets, to live in fear that you might not be sane.

You use the term ‘verisimilitude’ in the book, referring to details that give something the appearance of being real. Your use of verisimilitude is masterful. Can you give any clues as to how you used this device?

Thank you. I’m not sure I would call it a device. I think the aim of many novelists is for the world they write to feel as real as possible. Whether you write crime or romance or science-fiction or lit-fic or whatever, your story is more likely to come alive if readers don’t feel like the characters are walking around on empty sound stages.

The structure is innovative and strategic, with sections based on ‘After’ and ‘Before’ and other parts. Why have you chosen this structure?

The story is told in three threads. The first is the ‘After’ sections which all take place after Micah’s part-time boyfriend, Zach, is murdered. The ‘Before’ sections, obviously, take place before Zach’s murder. The third thread, with titles like ‘History of Me’, consists of Micah’s reflections on herself, her family, her school, her world. Liar is as much a jigsaw puzzle as a novel, but one where those pieces could go together in many different ways. Writing it was a puzzle, too. I wrote it back to front and inside out. Not from start to finish, but scene by scene. As I wrote I shuffled scenes around, rewriting them with every move. I think it would be interesting to see what readers made of it if they read it out of order too. It would be interesting to read it backwards. I have a feeling that might even work.

There was a groundswell of opposition to the US cover. What is the issue here?

I wrote a book about a black girl and my US publisher put an image of a white girl on the cover. When people started to read the advance copies of the book that disjunction made some readers start questioning whether Micah was lying about her race (she’s not) and others to be angry about the whitewashing. The subsequent opposition caused my US publisher to change the cover to an image that is closer to what Micah looks like. In Australia my publisher, Allen & Unwin, came up with a cover that evokes the book–it’s a psychological thriller, which is also in its way a murder mystery–without using a face, which was the approach I always wanted. I love the Australian cover of Liar. With the rejacketing of the US cover I’m now happy with both the Oz and US covers of Liar.

What are you working on next?

I prefer not to talk about books until I have at least a first draft. I fear it will jinx them. Though sometime when I’m really immersed in a book I kind of can’t help myself. I am not at that stage.

Fictional jigsaw

Why did you use a metafictive style (calling attention to the constructedness of the story)? For example, Micah is an unreliable narrator, Micah addresses the reader …

Where did your over-arching theme of lies and truth spring from?

The structure is innovative and strategic, with sections based on ‘After’ and ‘Before’ and other parts. Why have you chosen this structure?

There was a groundswell of opposition to the US cover. What is the issue here?

What are you working on next?

EXPOSURE by Joel Magarey excerpt

Here is

                 the unfinished map of the world,
                 the mists of slow mountains,
                 the ache of the whale,
                 the blue water crescent,
                 the sulphur-yellow caking
                 around the volcano,
                 the wind’s wild whisper.

Take it all and go further.

– Penny

Prologue

In the early years when we were kissing, Penny and I would sometimes share the same breath, one lungful flowing between us as long as the oxygen lasted. I would come as close to her in that warm blind join of air as later in the joining of our bodies, dreams, and journeys. But once, on a night in Bombay, when our journey to India had taken me too far, Penny kissed me that way to try to bring me back.

Late that night I’d found myself running through the blue-black streets of the Colaba district. Something was happening to me – I’d been pounding through these streets for hours. A few blocks back I’d given a white-haired old woman nearly all our remaining rupees. When she’d taken them I’d been flooded with relief, but now as I raced towards the hotel the fear was again at my heels.

Rounding a corner, unable to stop in time, I jumped over a body. Ahead hundreds more lay sprawled, Bombay’s homeless sleeping on the pavement. In panic I swerved away from the sleepers and ran down the middle of the empty road. I didn’t understand what was happening to me but I knew I had to avoid getting caught again. I tried to think only about getting back to Penny and the hotel room, and this time staying there. All night as I’d headed back I’d kept seeing more crippled women, blind men or deformed children and kept getting urges; and though I’d resisted them, in the room they’d become so painful I’d had to run out to those people too. And each time that happened the most frightening urge intensified – the pressure in my chest that wanted me not to leave India in the morning, to let Penny fly home without me, and to make these streets my life.

Chest burning, I stopped at a corner lit in hazy yellow light and looked up and down the intersecting roads. A quiet voice made me turn. By a shop window a bone-thin, shawled woman stood cradling a baby. Without thinking I met her gaze – and looked away too late. I’d seen the two bloody crescents of infection, crawling up the whites of her eyes. My mind stilled, then hazed. The new urge landed like a punch.

Come out again to her with your Australian dollars. Or she’ll go blind – left like this by you.

My palms flew to my temples, I turned, and I sprinted.

Ten minutes later I’d reached the hotel and was hurrying past the night watchman, leaping up the staircase, jogging along the passage. At last; in the room again. I slumped back against the door. Penny was sitting on the bed in her T-shirt and undies, face strained and disapproving.

‘Penny, there’s another one.’

‘Joel! You said that—’

‘Will you stop me if I try to go out again? Physically, if you have to?’

For a moment Penny stared. Then her expression softened, and she got up and came over to me.

‘I will.’ She nodded. ‘I’ll stop you.’ Taking my arm, she tugged on it gently. ‘So, now, come to bed.’

The relief her promise brought and the compassion spreading over her face drew out the tears that had been welling in me for the five days since this had started.

***

Exhausted, Penny fell asleep quickly. Within minutes the urge to go back out to the bloody-eyed woman began to whisper. One last run, quickly, while she’s still there. Save her sight . . .

Sweating, stomach knotting, I tossed and huffed, until Penny moaned and pulled herself to me, draping a warm arm around my shoulder.

‘Sleep, now,’ she murmured. ‘If there’s anything to do, we’ll see in the morning. Now, only sleep, okay?’

With a great effort I managed to lie still.

Two hours later, she woke again. ‘No good?’ She drew herself up to rest on an elbow. In the darkness I felt her hand exploring my face like a blind person’s.

‘Hey,’ she said. ‘Give me your mouth.’

Leaning down, she kissed me, then breathed gently into my mouth. I took her breath and returned it, and as we breathed like that I felt a caress of calmness for the first time since morning. She air-kissed me again; I felt calmer still. She did it a third time and finally, in that surging warmth, I felt the first gentle tugs of sleep, pulling me somewhere safe.

Praise for Exposure

‘An extraordinary story . . . wry, honest, amusing and evocative.’ Eva Hornung

‘A striking and substantial book, at once compelling, scary, delightfully comic and moving.’ Tom Shapcott

Joel Magarey guest blogs on life, death, and EXPOSURE

Since Exposure has come out, a few journalists have asked me what my most extreme travel experience was, which has got me thinking about death – always good for a new perspective on life. At first I thought the answer to their question had to be the experience I had in a Bolivian desert: setting fire to my hand and then my tent while still in my sleeping bag – then knocking over a full bottle of fuel to really get that blaze going. That was intense. Then I realised that, for intensity, I couldn’t go past nearly drowning in a glacier-fed Alaskan river that was busy freezing over.

A young inexperienced American called Troy and I had flown with a kayak into the remote Chigmit Mountains too late in autumn, when it was so cold the glaciers feeding our watercourse were only giving off a shallow trickle. We tore gaping holes in the kayak scraping to a halt on the constant gravel bars. Then Troy broke both our paddles trying to push us off the bars. Then, when the river finally got deeper and faster, we shot into some tree branches and capsized. In the 3-degree water I went into shock, my feet got stuck in the kayak and my head was forced under.

I digress. These memories have reminded me of not only how intensely alive a brush with death can make a person feel, but also a broader, parallel irony I discovered on my journey: that the passionate high road of our greatest desires runs close by the forest of our worst fears.

At 25, with a mind filled with dreams and post-Catholic sexual hang-ups, I had left my wise and beautiful love of seven years, Penny – along with a promising career in journalism – for a limitless global journey I’d imagined since childhood. I was also leaving behind a recent and unpalatable diagnosis, of obsessive compulsive disorder, and an unfinished course of therapy for it.

Very soon I’d got myself into some interesting pickles, such as a three-week compulsive nightmare involving Los Angeles, my terror of Alaska killing me, and many, MANY sleeping bags. Then there was the climb into Arctic mountains I undertook in November with almost no relevant experience. The cold was so intense it snap-froze the drips from my constantly dripping nose. To get food into my mouth I had to break foot-long stalactites from my nostrils.

I thought I was moving towards what I wanted – wider experience of love and women, a richer entry into life, and the mental cure I thought I could find for myself. And it was an astonishing journey, filled with wonders, intensities and joy — but also longing and illness. Two thirds of the way around the world, as I fell victim to another OCD attack in Zimbabwe, I saw in a moment that in some of the deepest ways I’d been heading far from where I’d thought I was going. I’d been risking madness but not health. I’d been risking death in a kayak and a Bolivian desert but not life with a woman I couldn’t stop loving.

I can’t give away how it all panned out for me; but death, life, and risk bring me back to that Alaskan river.

As Adrenalin finally kicked in, I wrenched my legs out of the kayak. Troy and I hauled ourselves out of the water and lay on top of the upturned kayak as it began to pick up speed. True, we still had problems. And we were heading towards more – like a white, frothing rapid just downriver – but that’s another story, another brush with death. For the moment, we were alive, and we knew it in every nerve.

Praise for Exposure

‘An extraordinary story . . . wry, honest, amusing and evocative.’ Eva Hornung

‘A striking and substantial book, at once compelling, scary, delightfully comic and moving.’ Tom Shapcott

How To Paint A Dead Man By Sarah Hall

The curious title of this book gives no clues to its contents other than to suggest that art is the link which binds this book together. Even the quotation from Cennino d’Andrea Cennini, from which the title is taken and which is included at the end of this book, only confirms that subtlety, colour, light and shadow are a necessary part of the way in which Sarah Hall paints her characters.

Signor Giorgio is an Italian artist famous for his obsessive depictions of a small group of bottles. Dying of cancer in a small town in Umbria, he looks back on his life and work, meditates on the meaning of art, remembers a past troubled by war and loss, and has daily battles with Theresa, his housekeeper, to maintain his smoking habit. One of his fond memories is of a young English artist, Peter, who once wrote him stimulating letters about art but who never included his address, so could not be answered.

Thirty years later, Peter Caldicutt, successful, middle-aged and described by his daughter as “one of his generation’s formidable eccentrics”, still struggles with the demands of art, both philosophically and literally. Trudging the rugged Cumbrian landscape which is his inspiration, he slips and becomes trapped. So begins his own musing on life, death and art, as he also contemplates the irony of being so unpredictable and unreliable that no-one will immediately miss him or know where he is and he may well die of exposure.

A little later again, Sue, Peter’s daughter, is also an artist. Her own field is photography but she is currently curator of an exhibition of objects which have had close personal significance for famous artists. A bottle given to her for the exhibition by her father forms a link with Signor Giorgio. Sue is reeling from the sudden, accidental death of her twin brother. Her sense of self has been fragile since childhood, but now, again, she is distanced from everything around her. She talks of herself as ‘you’, struggles to feel present, and discovers that only in the dangerous and illicit affair with her close friend’s husband can she feel alive and human. Sex, described in graphic detail by Sue, is voyeuristic and coldly un-erotic in spite of shared lust and passion, but only through this sex can she find relief from the numbing separation from reality which she feels.

The fourth person whose life we enter in this book is a young Italian girl, Annette Tambroni, whose growing, congenital blindness has given her a special quality of imaginative vision which Signor Giorgio, who briefly met her whilst teaching art to local schoolchildren, describes as a gift for discovering invisible things. As readers, we experience Annette’s world through that vision, and Sarah Hall’s exceptional ability to convey the experiences and personality of each of her characters is at its best in Annette’s story.

Annette is innocent and vulnerable. She vaguely remembers a painting in her church which depicts ‘the Bestia’ but cannot describe it exactly and in her imagination it comes to represent all the unspeakable things which her obsessively religious mother fears for her but will not discuss. The atmosphere of suppressed sexual tension, especially associated with the men in Annette’s family, is palpable, but Sarah Hall also manages to create incredible beauty, even in the final horror that enters Annette’s life.

Four different characters, four different stories, four different ways of telling the stories and a shifting pattern of time-frames throughout the book, all make this an ambitious novel which poses challenges for both the author and the reader. But Sarah Hall writes beautifully, intelligently and, at times, with simple poetic flair. The chapter titles, ‘The Mirror Crisis’, ‘Translated from the Bottle Journals’, ‘The Fool on the Hill’, and ‘The Divine Vision of Annette Tambroni’, repeat in that order throughout the book as each character’s story develops; and inevitably, perhaps, some stories are more gripping than others. I must admit that Peter’s dilemma caused me to skip chapters in order to discover whether he escaped and survived. But I did go back and finish the other chapters, and Signor Giorgio, Sue and Annette each held my attention in different ways.

Structurally, and in some of its content, this is not an easy book to read but it is absorbing, interesting, innovative and a thought-provoking way of considering some of the many aspects of art.

The Selected Works of T.S. Spivet by Reif Larsen

T.S.Spivet is a twelve-year-old genius maker of maps, plans and illustrations. “I think”. he tells a CNN interviewer, “we are born with a map of the entire world in our heads…the patterns are already there and I see the map in my head and then just draw it”. This is a simplified version of what he tells the scientists at the Smithsonian, but they are cleverer than a CNN man trying to entertain an audience. T.S., however, is still just a child and his Selected Works are a wonderful grab-bag collection of his notes, drawings, maps and stories, as well as a vivid, funny and sometimes terrifying tale of how he came to be at the Smithsonian that night and the adventures he had getting there.

T.S. (the initials stand for ‘Tecumseh Sparrow’, and how he came by them is a story in itself) lives with his family on a ranch in Montana. He can recite the latitude and longitude of his address to the nearest second, but he is not so certain about the thoughts and feelings of his family. His sister, Gracie, is sixteen and T.S. regards her as “the most together member of the family”. She is smart, sassy, and, when the family exasperates her, is inclined to a behaviour which T.S. has labelled ‘Dork Retreat’: i.e. she will plug in her earphones and/or retreat to her room with her music. If T.S. is the cause, he knows he can mollify her with 500 grams of chewy tape.

T.S’s mother, Dr Clare, is, so he says, “a misguided coleopterist” who has spent her entire adult life studying and classifying beetles. She can’t cook, is a champion blower-up of toasters, and she is “the kind of mother who would teach you the periodic table while feeding your porridge as an infant”. T.S. feels close to his mother and shares some of her interests but doesn’t understand her continuing obsession with finding a particular species of moth. He is much less close to his father, who is a taciturn farmer: “the sort of man who will walk into a room and say something like ‘you can’t bullshit a cricket’, and then just leave”.

No longer part of the family, but still very much a part of T.S’s notebooks, is Layton, his younger brother who has only recently died in a shooting accident which none of the family will talk about and which T.S. fears may have been his fault.

T.S. makes sense of his life by charting it in diagrams, maps and plans which he keeps in the colour-coded notebooks lining the walls of his room The extent of his curiosity and the huge variety of his work is apparent in the Selected Works, where panels alongside the text show (in a random selection) detailed botanical drawings; plans for corn-shucking; stages of male pattern baldness; “My first Inertia Experiment…a disaster”; his brother’s rocking horse; a map of the locations of the 26 McDonalds restaurants in North Dakota and much, much more. Some of this work has been sent by a family friend to the Smithsonian, Scientific American, Science, Discovery and Sport Illustrated for Kids, and some (in particular, his meticulous illustration of how the Bombardier Beetle mixes and expels boiling secretions from its abdomen) has been published.

T.S’s Smithsonian adventure begins with a phone call from an official who tells him that he has won the prestigious Baird Award for the popular advancement of science. Unaware of T.S’s age, he invites him to attend the Smithsonian’s hundred-and-fiftieth anniversary celebration dinner in Washington in order to accept the award and to give a keynote address. T.S. initially declines the invitation, but after a really scary day failing to help his father free ‘Old Stinky’, the bad-tempered goat, from some barbed wire on the farm and almost being bitten by a rattlesnake into the bargain, he changes his mind. To get to Washington, however, without talking to the Smithsonian official again and disclosing his age, is a problem. T.S. decides to make it a true adventure and, like Hanky the Hobo of a story he once heard, he decides to jump a freight train.

A large part of the Selected Works tells of T.S’s adventures, some of which are terrifying. Interspersed with these, however, are extracts from a notebook which he stole from his mother’s study as he was leaving. These tell the story of Emma Osterville, who married Tecumseh Tearho Spivet, T.S’s great, great, grandfather.

Emma’s life and her struggles to be accepted as a geologist in the conservative, male-dominated scientific world of America in the 1800s, make fascinating reading. Nevertheless, I was so taken up with T.S’s adventures that I began to skip over them to find out what happened to T.S. and then came back to them later. If T.S. had drawn a plan of the way I read this book (and he did once try to map Melville’s Moby Dick), it might have looked like this:

Main story….side notes….main story….side notes….Emma’s story….main story….main story….main story….Emma’s story….side notes….Emma’s story….T.S’s thanks….Reif Larsen’s thanks….Publisher’s information page.

Whichever way you read this book, it is a wonderfully imaginative work of art and literature. Reif Larsen captures the spirit of a twelve-year-old boy, but also manages to tell a story, or stories, which will appeal to a many age-groups. Many of T.S’s observations are very acute and very funny, although only an adult might see the humour of some of them. Larsen’s publishers, too, have done him proud. The book itself is innovative and inventive and a delight. Even T.S’s thanks page and Reif Larsen’s own acknowledgements are worth reading, and I particularly liked T.S’s additions to the publisher’s information page at the front of the book – a page which only publishers, booksellers, librarians and reviewers would normally read. Added to the CIP Catalogue information is a note: “This book is about”- and a list of 27 entries, which includes “7. WHISKEY DRINKING – FICTION”, ” 12. HOBO SIGNS – FICTION”, “16. HONEY NUT CHEERIOS – FICTION”, and even an entry for “MIDWESTERN WORMHOLES”, which is also Fiction. That should make shelving the book in any particular section of a bookshop difficult!

This is a truly inspired, inspiring, imaginative and novel novel, and you can see more about it at http://www.tsspivet.com/

CLAIRE HALLIDAY guest blogs, asking…

Do you want sex with that?

Our attitudes to sex in society have hit the headlines more than once in recent weeks – the public reaction to the Kyle and Jackie O lie detector debacle in which a teenage girl was forced to submit to an on-air interrogation about her past sexual experiences; the enormous social media-led outcry, prompted by Mia Freeman’s blog, over clothing chain Cotton On’s increasingly inappropriate t-shirt slogans (I’m A Tits Man) for babies; and the ongoing political debate about same sex marriages.

Sex sells, it’s true, and in Australian society today it seems that there is so much of it to buy. The alternative is, I guess, to simply ignore it but, from billboards to music video hits on weekend television, it’s becoming a tougher thing to do.

I’m thinking about all this – and much more – in the lead-up to my appearance at the Brisbane Writers’ Festival. Never done the writers’ festival thing before – not as a speaker anyway – and now trying to come up with intelligent points to make about the topic at hand. It’s actually Women Talking Erotica but from that, I’m sure, will spring an argument or two about where we are at with sex in Australian culture today – an age where sex and the advertising of its influence seems to dominate our visual media, like it or not.

Sometimes, my conservatism alarms me. Other times, I try to pick up the phone to give Mum a heads-up to all my ‘wild days’ revelations about to be published in my new book and think I should have been more conservative when I was younger. Just a bit. (I still haven’t made that phone call.)

I’ve had my share of it it’s true – breathed excitement into men as a fantasy phone call operator, been on the set of porn films and at swingers’ parties in my role as feature writer for various magazines and newspapers across the country and have, in the biblical sense, utilised it for its ‘higher’ purpose in the conception of four children. And in the end it’s probably motherhood, more than anything, that has shaped my current attitudes.

And so I am thinking, trying to make sense of a topic that has the power to cause people to make no sense at all. Do I want sex with that? Sometimes. And the other times – in the delivery of my barbecue chicken advertisement, or my toddler’s fashion statements? Well, no, actually. But is anyone listening?

Do You Want Sex With That? by Claire Halliday
Combining memoir and reportage, this is an extremely brave and honest look at the place of sex throughout Australian life: from the pervasive sexualisation of advertising and children, to the more minority pursuits of swinging and porn-films, as well as the rise of the abstinence movement.

September Book Giveaway

SEPTEMBER MAJOR GIVEAWAY

Let this month’s prize pack take you on an unforgettable journey – globe-trot with Joel Magarey, get lost among the desert elephants of Namibia, pig out in northern Spain. Relax and soak in William McInnes’ reflections on his father, and unleash your inner-child with the hottest children’s releases. The pack includes:

A Man’s Got To Have A Hobby by William McInnes SIGNED

Ivory Moon by Sally Henderson

Exposure: A Journey by Joel Magarey

Everything But The Squeal by John Barlow

Schooling Around: Robot Riot! by Andy Griffiths

Looking For Flavour by Barbara Santich

It’s Yr Life by Tempany Deckert & Tristan Bancks

Gone by Michael Grant

The Greatest Blogger In The World by Andrew McDonald

To go into the draw to win these books, just complete the entry form here. Entries close September 30, 2009.

SEPTEMBER FACEBOOK GIVEAWAY

When you join our Facebook Group, not only do you become a part of one of Australia’s fastest growing online book groups, you also go into the draw to win prizes! This month, one lucky member will win a pack that includes:

The Pheonix Files: Arrival by Chris Morphew

Brainjack by Brian Falkner

Big Stories From Little Lunch by Danny Katz, illustrated by Mitch Vane

Scatterheart by Lili Wilkinson

Allie McGregor’s True Colours by Sue Lawson

Tales From The Labyrinth/The Stone Ladder by Peter Lloyd

Jetty Road by Cath Kenneally

Chinese Cinderella: The Mystery of the Song Dynasty Painting

A big thanks to our friends at Allen and Unwin, Black Dog Books, Hachette, Hardie Grant Egmont, Pan Macmillan, Random House, Wakefield Press and Walker Books for supporting our giveaways this month.