Our enthusiastic readers at QBD Hurstville dazzle with their latest reads
as they steal this week’s QBD Spotlight!
The Dry by Jane Harper:
A brutal crime rocks a town suffering the worst drought in a century. Luke Hadler turns a gun on his wife and child, then himself. The farming community of Kiewarra is facing life and death choices daily. Federal Police investigator Aaron Falk returns to Kiewarra for the funerals and in doing so is forced to confront the people who rejected him 20 years earlier. Falk and childhood friend Luke shared a secret, one which Luke’s death brings to the surface. Falk’s investigative skills are called on and facts start to make him doubt the murder-suicide charge. As he probes deeper into the killings, old wounds start bleeding into fresh ones…..
Jane Harper’s debut novel is addictive, taking me only a day to read it! – Sally (Store Manager)
Cell by Stephen King:
Cell offers a unique take on the overcrowded post apocalyptic zombie genre. The Pulse, a signal transmited through cellphones, turns everyone with a phone to their ear into zombie-like crazed brutes, attacking the infected and normal people alike.
Clay, the main character, is extremely relatable. He’s not a soldier, nor does he have super-human like reflexes and strength. He’s a normal guy, just trying to get back to his family. We can’t help but feel his struggle as obstacles block his path.
Scary, intense, suspensful, but also full of action, Cell is a riveting book. With its ending being open to interpretation, it will leave you thinking about it for days to come. – Alex (Store 2IC)
Murder on the Orient Express by Agatha Christie:
Murder On The Orient Express follows Agatha Christie’s most recognised character, Belgian detective Hercule Poirot. This crime thriller is centred around an intriguing murder on-board a train to Croatia. As the story unfolds we are invited to see the conscience of the main character as he struggles to accept that there is any justification for murder. I enjoyed the twist at the end, as the story breaks from tradition, endearing Poirot as a character with both honour and humanity.
Christie is a timeless author, whose works have appealed to audiences for almost 100 years. This classic story is a great read that I highly recommend to all lovers of the crime fiction genre. – Lara
The Martian by Andy Weir:
The Martian tells the story of Mark Watney, an astronaut on a NASA mission to Mars who is left stranded after being presumed dead by his team whilst fleeing a savage storm. Left with no communications, dwindling supplies and no rescue team, Watney has to find a way to survive.
It’s a fantastic, tension filled setup, but Weir also has a very modern, slick, scientific basis backing his narrative that lends a proper sense of realism to the plot. Put simply, The Martian is the nerdiest action survival story I’ve ever read. The research put into this book is extensive, with everything from orbital equations to the body’s energy requirements thrown into Watney’s struggle to survive. And it’s not just the science – in Watney, Weir has also created a very likeable protagonist, self-effacing but also heroic and intelligent. And funny, too – he manages to pull off the tricky feat of making prose funny for the most part, and it is Watney’s personality and narrative voice in telling the story that turns a book with for the most part only a single character into a page turner.
Andy Weir has come out of the publishing blocks on a superpowered rocket with his debut novel – The Martian will make you laugh, think, and most of all keep you reading up until the very last page. – Jamie
The Raven Boys by Maggie Stiefvater:
Richard Gansey III is looking for a king. As he searches for the mysterious Glendower, hoping that waking the long sleeping king will grant him a favour, he draws in the local inhabitants of Henrietta, including Ronan, Adam, and Noah. Meanwhile, Blue Sargent, resident of Henrietta’s local house of clairvoyants, knows that her true love is fated to die if she kisses him.
Following a disastrous first meeting with Gansey and the rest of his Raven Boys, Blue is drawn into the quest for Glendower and finds a place for herself among the boys, each of whom is as much of an outcast as the other. As they continue down the path of discovery, they find that Henrietta, Virginia is not the quiet town they think it is, but is rife with a magic that lies beneath the surface, intertwining with their lives.
Stiefvater brings together this cast of misfit characters so well that readers feel like they’ve made friends in them. As a Virginian native, she recreates a fictional town with all the nuances of the place, then layers over them with elements of the fantastical, drawn from history and myth and fairy tales. Her stylistic prose is captivating and unlike that of most young adult novels. This is the perfect book for anyone searching for something with the darkness and mystery of the paranormal, while still being full of heart. – Mersini
