New Titles and Recommendations March 2024

March 2024

Imbi Neeme is a recovering blogger, ardent novelist and spreadsheet enthusiast. Her manuscript The Spill was awarded the 2019 Penguin Literary Prize. She blogged for many years at Not Drowning, Mothering, which won the 2010 Bloggies Award for best ANZ Weblog. She lives in Footscray on the right side of the Maribyrnong.

Book of the Month

Kind of Sort of Maybe…but probably not by Imbi Neeme.

Librarian Phoebe Cotton lives with misophonia. The sound of other people crunching an apple, slurping their tea or snapping chewing gum fills her with a rage that she buries deep within.

Mortified by her ‘Not Quite Right’ brain she hides away inside 6 Salmon Street, the family home that her formidable grand-mother Dorothy has abandoned for a more convivial life at the Western Retreat Retirement Village. But when Phoebe
begins receiving mysterious postcards in the mail, she slowly, but surely, finds herself being pulled back out into the world and towards Monty, the sweet postal clerk.

Across town,Suze a university student with a high distinction in study avoidance, is clinging to the hope that the neglectful J might actually be her boyfriend. When J’s attention turns to Ky, it sets Suze on a path that leads her to 6 Salmon Street and Phoebe Cotton.

Together with Suze and Monty, Phoebe goes on a mission to solve the mystery of the postcards but ends up finding much, much more, including acceptance, strength and love.

Recommended Reads

No Comfort on a Chilly Night | Noel Braun

Felix Schmidt is backpacking on the Camino de Santiago when he meets the love of his life, the beautiful French Pascaline. He brings her back to Australia where he joins a new firm of management consultants. Deeply engrossed in the company’s growth, he neglects Pascaline. She believes his
addiction has reduced him as a person, wearies of his obsessive workaholism and returns to France.

Felix pines for his lost love, but as the company expands, he advances into management and is totally immersed. Disillusioned the ambition has seduced him to climb a ladder that leads to nowhere, that forces him to inflict pain and make decisions he abhors, he loathes the character he has become. Eventually, he quits his work. Once free of responsibility, he aims to win back Pascaline, but first he must work on himself to restore his former undistorted self. With trepidation he returns to France, anxious about the person he will find in Pascaline.

Issi Mac | Whitford Roche

Isabella McMillan is young, beautiful, and smart. A much loved daughter with her future mapped out and secure. She knows what is expected of her – Melbourne in 1956 has a box just the right shape for a Chinese-Australian lawyer-to-be. And yet…

When she meets a university lecturer names Alexander, he seems to offer her freedom from the claustrophobic privilege of her life and convinces her to come away with him. Only in Oxford, England, is the real man revealed. As Issie grapples with her fading dreams and impetuous choices, she is hurled into a future she could not have imagined and does not wish her parents to glean. And so, to London. There at a run down boarding house, she finds unexpected things: warmth, friendship, the means to support herself – and the strength to not only face her past, but to start again.

The Bonnie Dead | Andrew Raymond

Five years ago, DCI John Lomond led the search for notorious Glasgow child-killer ‘The Sandman’ until personal tragedy forced him off the case. In Lomond’s absence, the killer was never found. Now with nothing but work left in his life,
Lomond remains obsessed with the case- despite the nightmares it brings. When a child is abducted in similar Sandman fashion from an affluent Glasgow suburb, Lomond is brought in to find them before it’s too late. But the only forensic evidence belongs to a little girl who was abducted and murdered twenty years ago.

More of Rosemary’s new releases & recommendations.

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