5 Addictive Winter Holiday Reads 2017
Let’s face it, many of us are a bit ‘over’ the heat and the craziness of summer and are welcoming the cooler weather with open arms. Most people have been back at work for a few months since their Christmas break and some are counting down the days until they get another. If you are planning a short break specifically to relax and take it easy, then what is more relaxing than immersing yourself in an award-winning, gripping novel? We have listed 5 of the best-selling novels from 2016 according to Dymocks book stores and you won’t be disappointed.
At PetLet, we get that exploring bookshelves is one of the great joys of life. After walking into someone’s home, if social mores permit, you’ll find me standing in front of their bookshelves checking out their collection. Is it just me or does a person’s book collection tell you more about them than just about anything else? If you can relate to this, then check out our bookshelves at our PetLet properties. You will find a great range of literary fiction (including Mann Booker prize winners), contemporary fiction and some airport novels (perfect for that quick easy read on a short break!).
Back to the five best-selling novels of 2016. We have listed where you can buy these books online, but if you are staying at one of our properties on the southern fleurieu (between Encounter Bay and Goolwa), then pop into Big W at Victor Harbor for a good range of contemporary fiction at bargain prices, including all the books listed below, and the best 100 fiction books of all time (according to whom I cannot recall!).
If you want to experience the unbridled thrill of a real bookshop, owned by bibliophiles then you must go into the South Seas book shop at Pt Elliot. Wander through their huge collection of fiction and non-fiction, with handwritten recommendations from the staff. Then get a coffee and sit on one of their gorgeous retro sofas and bask in the glow of book heaven!
Really, this time we are back to the list of books!
#1 The Husband’s Secret by Liane Moriarty
“My Darling Cecilia, if you’re reading this, then I’ve died…”
Imagine your husband wrote you a letter, to be opened after his death. Imagine, too, that the letter contains his deepest, darkest secret – something with the potential to destroy not just the life you built together, but the lives of others too. Imagine, then, that you stumble across that letter while your husband is still very much alive. Read more HERE.
Excerpt and photo from lianemoriarty.com.au.
Liane Moriarty is the Australian author of six internationally best-selling novels but her breakout novel The Husband’s Secret sold over three million copies worldwide and is still selling fast. It was a number 1 UK bestseller, an Amazon Best Book of 2013 and has been translated into over 40 languages. It spent over a year on the New York Times bestseller list. CBS Films has acquired the film rights.
The perfect book to curl up on the sofa with on a cool Autumn day with a hot cup of tea (or a glass of CabSav!) and your fur kid curled up next to you.
Where to buy (Cheapest)
Online – kmart.com.au
Store – Kmart
Price: $9.00 + postage
#2 The Dry by Jane Harper
Luke Hadler turns a gun on his wife and child, then himself. The farming community of Kiewarra is facing life and death choices daily. If one of their own broke under the strain, well…
When Federal Police investigator Aaron Falk returns to Kiewarra for the funerals, he is loath to confront the people who rejected him twenty years earlier. But when his investigative skills are called on, the facts of the Hadler case start to make him doubt this murder-suicide charge. Read more HERE.
Excerpt and photo from janeharper.com.au.
Another Aussie masterpiece is Jane Harper’s gripping bush town crime thriller, The Dry. Jane Harper has worked as a print journalist for thirteen years both in Australia and the UK. Winner of the Victorian Premier’s Literary Award for an Unpublished Manuscript, The Dry is her first novel with rights sold to over twenty territories. Reese Witherspoon’s production company has picked up the film rights to The Dry.
You will want to jump into bed early with this one. It is a page turner and you won’t want to put it down!
Where to buy (Cheapest)
Online –Bigw.com
Store – Big W
Price: $18.00 + postage
#3 All the Light We Cannot See by Anthony Doerr
Winner of the 2015 Pulitzer Prize for fiction!
Marie-Laure lives with her father in Paris near the Museum of Natural History, where he works as the master of its thousands of locks. When she is six, Marie-Laure goes blind and her father builds a perfect miniature of their neighbourhood so she can memorise it by touch and navigate her way home. When she is twelve, the Nazis occupy Paris and father and daughter flee to the walled citadel of Saint-Malo, where Marie-Laure’s reclusive great-uncle lives in a tall house by the sea. With them, they carry what might be the museum’s most valuable and dangerous item. Read more HERE.
Excerpt from pulitzer.org/Photo from anthonydoerr.com
Anthony Doerr is a multi-award winning author and has won numerous prizes both in the US (where he resides) and internationally. ‘All the Light we Cannot See’is the book everyone was talking about after its release. It is an emotional rollercoaster of 700+ pages and not for the faint hearted. A highly-recommended book by so many!
Autumn holiday reading at its best! Although with 700+ pages to get through, you had better get the other half to drive to your holiday spot, so you can start reading as soon as you leave your driveway!
Where to buy (Cheapest)
Online – kmart.com.au
Store – Kmart
Price: $9.00 + postage
#4 A Little Life by HanyaYanagihara
A Little Life by HanyaYanagihara is an immensely powerful and heartbreaking novel of brotherly love and the limits of human endurance.
When four graduates from a small Massachusetts college move to New York to make their way, they’re broke, adrift, and buoyed only by their friendship and ambition. They’re kind, handsome Willem, an aspiring actor; JB a quick-witted, sometimes cruel Brooklyn-born painter seeking entry to the art world; Malcolm, a frustrated architect at a prominent firm; and withdrawn, brilliant, enigmatic Jude, who serves as their centre of gravity. Over the decades, their relationships deepen and darken, tinged by addiction, success, and pride. Yet their greatest challenge, each comes to realize, is Jude himself, by midlife a terrifyingly talented litigator yet an increasingly broken man, his mind and body scarred by an unspeakable childhood, and haunted by what he fears is a degree of trauma that he’ll not only be unable to overcome – but that will define his life forever. Read more HERE
Excerpt and photo from Dymocks.com.au
A Little Life is HanyaYanagihara’s second novel, it was shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize in Britain and a finalist at the National Book Awards in the US. It won the Kirkus Prize for fiction and has sold incredibly well worldwide.
All novelists hope for a passionate response to their work. Yanagihara set out to provoke one. Yanagihara says “It is a book of extremes, in as many ways as I could make it,” she says. “Extreme suffering and extreme elation, extreme despair and extreme love, extreme poverty, in all senses of the world, and extreme wealth … The worst thing you can have as a writer is a shrug of the shoulders.”
If you take this novel on holidays with you, you may find yourself making excuses not to go out sightseeing with the family, just so you can stay back and immerse yourself in one of the most controversial books of last year.
Where to buy (Cheapest)
Online – www.fishpond.com.au
Store – Dymocks
Price: $13.85 + Free postage (Fishpond.com.au) $19.95 (Dymocks)
#5 My Brilliant Friend by Elena Ferrante
A modern masterpiece from one of Italy’s most acclaimed authors.
My Brilliant Friend is a rich, intense, and generous-hearted story about two friends, Elena and Lila. The story begins in the 1950s, in a poor but vibrant neighbourhood on the outskirts of Naples. Growing up on these tough streets the two girls learn to rely on each other ahead of anyone or anything else. As they grow, as their paths repeatedly diverge and converge, Elena and Lila remain best friends whose respective destinies are reflected and refracted in the other. They are likewise the embodiments of a nation undergoing momentous change. Through the lives of these two women, Ferrante tells the story of a neighbourhood, a city, and a country as it is transformed in ways that, in turn, also transform the relationship between her protagonists, the unforgettable Elena and Lila. Read more HERE.
Excerpt from elenaferrante.com/photo from textpublishing.com.au
My Brilliant Friend is the first in a trilogy of masterpieces from one of Italy’s most acclaimed and for 25 years’, pseudonymous Italian novelist. Very little is known about this author, what she looks like, what her real name is, when she was born, how she lives—these things have been unknown for a quarter of a century until recently (allegedly). What fans do know and have always known though, is that this writer is a masterful storyteller and one of the greatest novelists of our time. She was also named one of the 100 most influential people on the planet by TIME magazine in 2016.
A comfy chair, glass of wine, a balcony and ‘My Brilliant Friend’…. Sounds perfect!
Where to buy (Cheapest)
Online – angusrobertson.com.au
Store – Dymocks
Price: $18.30 + postage (Angus & Robertson) $22.99 (Dymocks)