In March our selection includes a tale about a café offering its customers a unique experience, a story about six astronaughts who witness shows of spectactular beauty, and a novel about the power of finding solace in literature and connection with people we might never meet in person.
Find out about each one below and remember to email your choice.
The Correspondent
by Virginia Evans
84 Charing Cross Road meets A Man Called Ove in this heartwarming, witty story about the life of an extraordinary woman, told through her letters.
In her letters to family and friends we come to know the life of Sybil Van Antwerp- stubborn, cantankerous, opinionated, always steadfast in her belief in the power of the written word.
But as the clock begins to tick for Sybil, the need for a few post-scripts to the life she’s led becomes apparent. Fixing her difficult relationship with her children. Taking a final chance at romance. Atoning for an old legal case which has come back to haunt her. And finally, reckoning with a devastating loss that she has spent the last thirty years holding close to her chest.
Sutherland Library: 42 copies, 92 holds
Kmart: Paperback $18:00
Big W: Doesn’t stock
Orbital
by Samantha Harvey
**WINNER OF THE BOOKER PRIZE 2024**
**THE #1 SUNDAY TIMES BESTSELLER**
‘A slim, profound study of intimate human fears set against epic vistas’
GUARDIAN
‘Stunning… An uplifting book’
SUNDAY TIMES
Life on our planet as you’ve never seen it before
A team of astronauts in the International Space Station collect meteorological data, conduct scientific experiments and test the limits of the human body. But mostly they observe. Together they watch their silent blue planet, circling it sixteen times, spinning past continents and cycling through seasons, taking in glaciers and deserts, the peaks of mountains and the swells of oceans. Endless shows of spectacular beauty witnessed in a single day.
Yet although separated from the world they cannot escape its constant pull. News reaches them of the death of a mother, and with it comes thoughts of returning home. They look on as a typhoon gathers over an island and people they love, in awe of its magnificence and fearful of its destruction.
The fragility of human life fills their conversations, their fears, their dreams. So far from earth, they have never felt more part – or protective – of it. They begin to ask, what is life without earth? What is earth without humanity?
‘Our unanimity about Orbital recognises its beauty and ambition. It reflects Harvey’s extraordinary intensity of attention to the precious and precarious world we share’ Edmund de Waal, Chair of the 2024 Booker Prize judges
*A BOOK OF THE YEAR FOR THE GUARDIAN, SUNDAY TIMES, FINANCIAL TIMES, NEW STATESMAN, SPECTATOR, DAILY MAIL AND MAIL ON SUNDAY*
Sutherland Library: 19 copies, eBook:Hoopla
Kmart: Doesn’t stock
Big W: Paperback $14
Before the Coffee Gets Cold
by Toshikazu Kawaguchi
One of the most popular Booktok books on Tiktok in 2022
In a small back alley in Tokyo, there is a café which has been serving carefully brewed coffee for more than one hundred years. But this coffee shop offers its customers a unique experience: the chance to travel back in time.
In Before the Coffee Gets Cold, we meet four visitors, each of whom is hoping to make use of the café’s time-travelling offer, in order to: confront the man who left them, receive a letter from their husband whose memory has been taken by early onset Alzheimer’s, to see their sister one last time, and to meet the daughter they never got the chance to know.
But the journey into the past does not come without risks: customers must sit in a particular seat, they cannot leave the café, and finally, they must return to the present before the coffee gets cold …
Toshikazu Kawaguchi’s beautiful, moving story explores the age-old question: what would you change if you could travel back in time? More importantly, who would you want to meet, maybe for one last time?
Sutherland Library: Book 8 copies, eBook, eAudiobook
Kmart: Paperback $12
Big W: Paperback $12