Booktopia - Australia's local bookstore

Pile by the Bed reviews The Other Side of Her by BM Carroll a domestic thriller partly based on her own experiences as an Irish backbackeroin Australia.

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Pile by the Bed reviews Dying to Know by Rae Cairns, a standalone thriller follow up to her Ned Kelly Award shortlisted debut The Good Mother.

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Pile by the Bed reviews Some Desperate Glory by Emily Tesh - a space opera with some audacious twists that will probably appeal more to YA readers.

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Pile by the Bed reviews Ada's Realm by Sharon Dodua Otoo, a historical fantasy exploring the lives of four women connected through history.

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Pile by the Bed reviews and recommends In the Lives of Puppets by TJ Klune a joyful, quasi-fairtale, science fictional reimagining and inversion of Pinocchio

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Pile by the Bed reviews Naked Ambition by Robert Gott a comedy that skewers Australian values and views that revolves around a naked portrait of a politician

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Pile by the Bed reviews Thirsty Animals by Rachelle Atalla a day-after-tomorrow pre-apocalyptic clifi novel set in a drought affected Scotland

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Pile by the Bed reviews The Curator by Owen King a historical urban fantasy exploring the aftermath of a popular revolt set in an alternate Europe

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Pile by the Bed reviews Adrian Tchaikivsky's return to fantasy with an urban uprising novel City of Last Chances

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Pile by the Bed reviews City of Dreams by Don Winslow, historical organised crime follow up to City on Fire, moving the bulk of the action to Los Angeles.

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Pile by the Bed reviews Jennifer Saint's third retelling of Greek Mythology - Atalanta, adopted daughter of Artemis and member of the crew of the Argo.

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Pile by the Bed finds Dennis Lehane back in the familiar territory of South Boston in the 1970s in his excoriating new book Small Mercies. Recommended

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Pile by the Bed reviews Rachel Heng's second novel The Great Reclamation, an exploration of the modernisation of Singapore between World War 2 and the 1960s.

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Pile by the Bed reviews The Half Brother by Christine Keighery a horror-tinged psychological thriller that explores the issue of nature versus nurture.

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Pile by the Bed reviews The Double Bind by Lorraine Peck, organised crime follow up to her Ned Kelly Award winning debut The Second Son.

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Pile by the Bed reviews A Day of Fallen Night by Samantha Shannon an epic standalone fantasy set five hundred years before the events of The Priory of the Orange Tree.

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Pile by the Bed reviews The Dream Builders by Oindrila Mukherjee a critical but compassionate exploration of the complexities of modern India

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Pile by the Bed reviews Red Queen by Juan Gómez-Jurado, the first book in his Spanish thriller trilogy featuring the hyper-intelligent Antonia Scott and her dogged partner, former police officer Jon Gutiérrez

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Pile by the Bed reviews Camp Zero by Michelle Min Sterling a cli-fi, day after tomorrow cautionary tale based in a scarily realistic future.

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Pile by the Bed reviews The Mimicking of Known Successes by Malka Older a Holmesian-style crime story set on Jupiter.

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Welcome to Night Vale by Fink and Cranor

The extremely strange town of Night Vale will be familiar to listeners to the popular podcast which has been going since 2012. For those who have never heard about the town of Night Vale – which is ruled over by a glow cloud (all hail the mighty glow cloud), where the most dangerous place is the library, it is subversive to believe in mountains, the most popular dish at the diner is invisible pie and where the police have been ...

Steeple by Jon Wallace

Jon Wallace’s debut novel, Barricade was a blistering, visceral ride through a post-robopocalyptic Britain. It dropped readers into a nuclear blasted landscape and an ongoing war between the ravaged, disease-ridden survivors of humanity (the Reals) and their implacable, seemingly indestructible android foes (the Ficials). Barricade’s protagonist, a Ficial called Kenstibec, emotionless and virtually indestructible, was the perfect gui...

The Silent Inheritance by Joy Dettman
Crime , Review / 14/03/2016

Joy Dettman delves into a world of crime in her latest novel. Over a wide cast of characters she manages to fit in a whole spectrum of crime and general meanness into a small space: from a serial killer through to a hit and run, perjury and drug dealing. The Silent Inheritance ranges across a large group of characters so it takes a while to get going. Sarah Carter, deaf since birth, is trying to get a promotion but is passed over for...

Fever City by Tim Baker
Crime , Historical , Review / 10/03/2016

There is nothing more certain than death, taxes and books about the assassination of JFK. This event had everything – sex, drugs, mafia, movie stars, the FBI, the CIA, communists. And to top it all off, as Tim Baker does not hesitate to point out in Fever City, it was an event that changed the course of America and world history. The shooting of JFK  has always been the motherload for conspiracy theorists but also for crime writers. ...

Emperor of the Eight Islands by Lian Hearn
Fantasy , Review / 06/03/2016

Lian Hearn returns to her best-selling faux-Japanese fantasy world in a new four book series being published in Australia in two volumes. Set three hundred years before her Tales of the Otori, The Tale of Shikanoko is pure sword and sorcery fantasy with a Japanese twist. As with her Otori series, the setting is not Japan, or even a Japanese version of ancient Japan, but it is a Japan-like world heavily based on the myths, legends and...

The Poison Artist by Jonathan Moore
Crime , Recommended , Review , Thriller / 06/03/2016

Many crime novels straddle the line between crime and horror. Serial killers, on the whole, are the stuff of nightmares and crime writers have been falling over themselves for some time to up the gore factor. While horror novels usually rely on some form of supernatural agency and do not necessarily have the neat resolution of the crime genre, the bloody results are often the same. And so it is with The Poison Artist – a crime novel ...

How to Set a Fire and Why by Jesse Ball
Literature , Recommended , Review / 06/03/2016

It is easy to compare any novel narrated by a disaffected American teenager with the seminal Catcher in the Rye. Holden Caulfield has become the archetypical American teen – intelligent, insightful and with plenty of promise but constantly fighting against a system which seeks to pigeon hole and repress. Lucia, the eighteen year-old narrator of How to Set a Fire and Why, fits into this mould but this is a very different tale and a ve...

Down Station by Simon Morden
Fantasy , Review / 06/03/2016

Doorways into magical lands are a venerable fantasy tradition going back centuries in English fiction. Think Alice in Wonderland or Peter Pan. In the Twentieth Century we had the seminal Narnia series and plenty of imitators followed. More recently we’ve even seen a modern deconstruction of that mythology in books like Lev Grossman’s Magician’s series. In this context, Simon Morden’s Down Station seems a little staid. The central ide...

The Midnight Watch by David Dyer

The sinking of the Titanic, now over one hundred years ago, is still one of the most famous disasters in history. So it is no wonder that it has been the subject of countless books and films. Given this, the question has to be whether there is the appetite for yet another novel exploring this incident. The answer, strongly given by David Dyer in his debut The Midnight Watch, is an unqualified yes. The Midnight Watch is not primarily ...

Fall by Candice Fox
Crime , Recommended / 23/01/2016

  Eden Archer, Australia’s answer to Dexter Morgan, and her damaged partner Frank Bennett are back at work in Fall, investigating a series of murders of women joggers. Underlying this investigation is another one by Frank’s lover (and former psychologist) Imogen, who solves cold cases in her spare time and is closing in on Eden’s true identity. There is plenty else going on in Fall, with Eden’s ex-crimelord father Hades having a...

Undermajordomo Minor by Patrick DeWitt
Fantasy , Literature , Review / 05/01/2016

Patrick deWitt has gone into fractured fairytale territory in his latest novel. Undermajordomo Minor, set somewhere in Europe, sometime in the nineteenth century comes complete with castles, dukes, battles, pickpockets, chambermaids and the titular majordomo. Lucien “Lucy” Minor needs to leave home. He lands himself a job as assistant to Olderclough, the majordomo  of the Castle von Aux. On arrival, Lucy finds that Olderclough’s prev...