Collection: PRE-LOVED BOOKS

Venice, 1468. Sosia Simeon, a free spirit with a strange predilection for books and Venetians is making her particular mark on the fabled city. On the other side of the Grand Canal, Wendelin von Speyer from Germany is setting up the first printing press in Venice and looking for the book that will make his fortune. A love triangle develops between Sosia, Wendelin's young editor, and the seductive scribe Felice Feliciano, a man who loves the crevices of the alphabet the way other men love the crevices of women. Before long, a dark magic begins to haunt Sosia and the printers: an obsessive nun and a book-hating priest conspire against them, and soon their fate hangs in the balance. For binding them all together is the poet Catullus - whose desperate and unrequited love inspired the most tender erotic poems of antiquity.

Condition: Pre-loved, Excellent

Format: C, 544 pages, Paperback
Published: May 1, 2003 by Virago Press
ISBN: 9781844080038 (ISBN10: 184408003X)
Language: English

A darkly satirical novel of love, revenge, and 1950s haute couture—now a major motion picture starring Kate Winslet, Judy Davis, Liam Hemsworth, and Hugo Weaving

After twenty years spent mastering the art of dressmaking at couture houses in Paris, Tilly Dunnage returns to the small Australian town she was banished from as a child. She plans only to check on her ailing mother and leave. But Tilly decides to stay, and though she is still an outcast, her lush, exquisite dresses prove irresistible to the prim women of Dungatar. Through her fashion business, her friendship with Sergeant Farrat—the town’s only policeman, who harbors an unusual passion for fabrics—and a budding romance with Teddy, the local football star whose family is almost as reviled as hers, she finds a measure of grudging acceptance. But as her dresses begin to arouse competition and envy in town, causing old resentments to surface, it becomes clear that Tilly’s mind is set on a darker design: exacting revenge on those who wronged her, in the most spectacular fashion.

Condition: Pre-loved, Excellent

Format: B, 320 pages, Paperback
Published: November 5, 2015 by Serpent's Tail
ISBN: 9781846689949 (ISBN10: 1846689945)
Language: English

A gripping first-hand account of life at home after World War One. When underage soldier, Joe Henry, returns from the war in 1918, the England that he comes home to is very different from the one he left behind. His father is injured and the Spanish flu is raging... Joe may have survived World War One, but the danger isn't over yet.

Condition: Pre-loved, Good - Duffy Book sticker inside front cover. 

Format: B, 144 pages, Paperback
Published: August 2, 2018 by Scholastic
ISBN: 9781407186689 (ISBN10: 140718668X)
Language: English

When your father moves you to live on an island, can you put your broken-apart family back together again?

Minna is a typical fourteen-year-old. She's got lots of friends, and her boyfriend is the school hunk. She's being encouraged to 'take the relationship to the next stage' by her friend Lizzie.

Home is pretty much a non-event. Her mother seems distracted, her father breezes in and out but isn't really present, her brother is a stoner. Her life is turned upside down when Dad announces that he wants them to live on an off-shore island for a year and work to make it into a conservation island. Minna is horrified at the idea, as is her mother. All the more so when they discover that the whole venture is to be made into a reality TV series.

To her utter dismay, Minna finds herself on an island, with only her family for company. There's no phone or email contact with the outside world. The helicopter ride to the island has made Mum sick and she doesn't seem to be recovering. Minna has to cope with new family dynamics, come to terms with the fact that her parents' marriage is doomed, and has to learn domestic arts that don't rate very highly on her excitement meter.

Can you find a new you?

Condition: Pre-loved, Excellent

Format: B,286 pages, Paperback
Published: March 2, 2007 by Random House New Zealand
ISBN: 9781869418366 (ISBN10: 1869418360)
Language: English

Gabriella has many siblings and more animals. Her father is an impoverished poet with a penchant for mending cars with string and optimism, her mother a classicist now more concerned with trying to keep track of spiralling chaotic family life than the declining of verbs. Gabriella and her brothers run amuck through the attics and wilderness garden of their home, Mildney. Here she observes and experiences the triumphs and pitfalls of belonging to a wayward family, and longs for conformity. Her failure to achieve it is absolute.

Condition: Pre-loved, Good

Format: B, Paperback
Published: January 1, 2000 by Headline Book Publishing Ltd
ISBN: 9780747264811 (ISBN10: 0747264813)
Language: English

Shona Karim is in love. When she first sets eyes on Parvez at the age of ten, she knows he is the man of her dreams. Just like her father - tricked into marriage by her shamelessly deceitful mother - she is a hopeless romantic. Years later, lying to themselves and their families, the young lovers elope to start a new life above a sweet shop in south London.

But Shona's inheritance is one of double lives and complicit deception. As time passes, and her children are born, it appears that she too has dark secrets that are about to be exposed. Can a family built on lies ever shake off its legacy? And can love ever be strong enough to right the wrongs of the past?

Condition: Pre-loved, Good

Format: B, 356 pages, Paperback
Published: August 3, 2008 by Pan Publishing
ISBN: 9780330443630 (ISBN10: 0330443631)
Language: English

A sweeping novel of world war, migration, and the search for new beginnings in a new land, The Sound of One Hand Clapping was both critically acclaimed and a best-seller in Australia. It is a virtuoso performance from an Australian who is emerging as one of our most talented new storytellers. It was 1954, in a construction camp for a hydroelectric dam in the remote Tasmanian highlands, where Bojan Buloh had brought his family to start a new life away from Slovenia, the privations of war, and refugee settlements. One night, Bojan's wife walked off into a blizzard, never to return -- leaving Bojan to drink too much to quiet his ghosts, and to care for his three-year-old daughter Sonja alone. Thirty-five years later, Sonja returns to Tasmania and a father haunted by memories of the European war and other, more recent horrors. As the shadows of the past begin to intrude ever more forcefully into the present, Sonja's empty life and her father's living death are to change forever. The Sound of One Hand Clapping is about the barbarism of an old world left behind, about the harshness of a new country, and the destiny of those in a land beyond hope who seek to redeem themselves through love.

Condition: Pre-loved, Good

Format: B, 425 pages, Paperback
Published: January 1, 1998 by Picador
ISBN: 9780330360425 (ISBN10: 0330360426)
Language: English