Millennium Trilogy

Four years ago, an unknown Swedish journalist delivered three manuscripts to his publishers in Stockholm. These supremely exciting, page-turning thrillers featuring crusading liberal journalist Mikael Blomkvist and disturbing punk heroine Lisbeth Salander came to be known as the Millennium Trilogy.

The Millennium Trilogy, written by journalist Stieg Larsson has sold millions of copies around the world. However its author did not live to see the success. Larsson died just months before the publication of the first volume.

That first novel, The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo, "combines murder mystery, family saga, love story, and financial intrigue into one satisfyingly complex and entertainingly atmospheric novel."

First published in Sweden, it was translated into English in early 2008. Book two in the trilogy is The Girl Who Played With Fire, and book three is The Girl Who Kicked The Hornet's Nest.

Click here to visit the official web site for Larsson's The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo, and here for the Australian publisher's web site.

Click here to search the library catalogue for books by Stieg Larsson.

Keats on the big screen

Jane Campion's movie Bright Star will be released in Australia soon. Inspired by Andrew Motion's biography of the poet John Keats who died at the age of 26, it stars Ben Whishaw as John Keats and Australian Abbie Cornish as Fanny Brawne.

Motion says that "Keats's story is amazingly charged: poverty, doomed love, extraordinary natural talent, lingering illness and early death."

Click here to visit the official movie web site or here to visit Keats web site where you can read his poems and letters, or participate in a Keats forum.

You can now follow us on Twitter.

If you have a Twitter account, or would like to sign up for one, make sure you follow us to be alerted to library programs and events, services, and book news.

Click here to view the library Twitter account, listed as LibrariesACT.

Five Greatest Warriors

Matthew Reilly's latest release, The Five Greatest Warriors, is out now.

Click here to visit Matthew's web site and discover more about his books.

Click here to search the library catalogue for more books by Matthew Reilly.

IT BEGAN WITH SIX STONES

Jack West Jr and his loyal team are indesperate disarray: they've been separated,their mission is in tatters, and Jack was last seen plummeting down a fathomless abyss.

IT FINISHES HERE

After surviving his deadly fall, Jack must now raceagainst his many enemies to locate and set in place the remaining pieces of The Machine beforethe coming Armageddon.

WHO ARE THE FIVE WARRIORS?

As the world teeters on the brink of destruction, he will learn of the Five Warriors, the individuals who throughout history have been most intimatelyconnected to his quest.

OCEANS WILL RISE, CITIES WILL FALL

Scores will be settled, fathers will fight sons,brothers will battle brothers, and Jack and his friends will soon find out exactly what theend of the world looks like...

2009 PM's Literary Award winners

The winners of the 2009 Prime Minister's Literary Awards were announced this week.

Fiction Winner

The Boat by Nam Le

In 1979, Nam Le's family left Vietnam for Australia, an experience that inspires the first and last stories in The Boat. In between, however, Le's imagination lays claim to the world. The Boat takes us from a tourist in Tehran to a teenage hit man in Columbia; from an aging New York artist to a boy coming of age in a small Victorian fishing town; from the city of Hiroshima just before the bomb is dropped to the haunting waste of the South China Sea in the wake of another war.

Each story uncovers a raw human truth. Each story is absorbing and fully realised as a novel. Together, the make up a collection of astonishing diversity and achievement.

Joint Non Fiction Winners

House of Exile: The Life and Times of Heinrich Mann and Nelly Kroeger-Mann by Evelyn Juers

Drawing the Global Colour Line by Marilyn Lake and Harry Reynolds

In 1933, the author and activist Heinrich Mann and his partner Nelly Kroeger fled Nazi Germany, finding refuge first in France and later, in great despair, in Los Angeles. Born into a wealthy middle class family in Lübeck, Heinrich was one of the leading representatives of Weimar culture; Nelly was twenty-seven years younger and a hostess in a Berlin bar.

Their story is crossed by others from their circle, including Heinrich’s brother Thomas Mann, their friends Bertolt Brecht, Alfred Döblin, and Joseph Roth, as well as the writers Egon Kisch, James Joyce, Franz Kafka, Virginia Woolf and Nettie Palmer. In train compartments, ships’ cabins and rented rooms, they called upon what was left to them — their bodies, their minds, their books — and amidst the debris of an era of self-destruction, built their own annexes to the House of Exile.

At last a history of Australia in its dynamic global context. In the late
nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, in response to the mobilisation and mobility of colonial and coloured peoples around the world, self-styled ‘white men’s countries’ in South Africa, North America and Australasia worked in solidarity to exclude those peoples they defined as not-white—including Africans, Chinese, Indians, Japanese and Pacific Islanders. Their policies provoked in turn a long international struggle for racial equality.

Through a rich cast of characters that includes Alfred Deakin, WEB Du Bois, Mahatma Gandhi, Lowe Kong Meng, Tokutomi Soho, Jan Smuts and Theodore Roosevelt, leading Australian historians Marilyn Lake and Henry Reynolds tell a gripping story about the circulation of emotions and ideas, books and people in which Australia emerged as a pace-setter in the modern global politics of whiteness. The legacy of the White Australia policy still casts a shadow over relations with the peoples of Africa and Asia, but campaigns for racial equality have created new possibilities for a more just future.

Remarkable for the breadth of its research and its engaging narrative, Drawing the Global Colour Line offers a new perspective on the history of human rights and provides compelling and original insight into the international political movements that shaped the twentieth century.

First for Australian poet

Did you know that Emma Jones is the first Australian to win an award in Britain's Forward Prize? Emma's collection The Striped World won the 2009 award for best first collection of poetry.

Click here to read more about the Forward Prize which was created to bring contemporary poetry to a wider audience.

Life Boat

Have you visited Civic Library recently and seen the boat suspended dramatically from the ceiling?

This sculpture, Life Boat, by Australian artist Nerine Martini, was installed in the Library in September, and uses the internal frame of a Vietnamese fishing boat complete with oars. It can be viewed from the foyer of the Canberra Theatre Centre, the mezzanine level of the Library and from the Library foyer below.

The work was created by Martini as the result of an artist residency in Vietnam in 2006. The idea for Life Boat was developed from a traditional Vietnamese vessel called a ‘ghe bau' or pregnant boat.

Life Boat is built from a stripped down boat which came from Hoi An, on the central coast of Vietnam. Eyes have been painted on the prow and the oars have become arms carved from recycled timber and coated with lacquer using traditional Vietnamese techniques.

Meet the author: A Woman's War

Join author Jacqueline Dinan on Remembrance Day to hear about the novel she wrote with her husband - discover what life was like for women in Australia during World War I, and how conscription became a great source of debate.

A Woman's War takes us into the life of a mother during the Great War. It provides a unique and intimate perspective of how she and other women of her inner-city, working class community endured an incredibly difficult period of Australiafs history and exemplified to future generations how to face hardship. This poignant and insightful story reveals tribulations and tragedies not talked about by the generations of women who followed them.

Wednesday 11 November 2009
11.00am - 11.45am
Civic Library

Click here to book online or phone 6205 9000.

"A remarkable story ... I heartily endorse the book as a means of raising awareness of the chronological events of WWI." ~ Dame Elisabeth Murdoch

"A story that touches every woman's heart and encapsulates the ANZAC spirit portrayed by the women of WWI, qualities we all reflect on in facing today's hardships." ~ Andrea Coote, MP

"As there are so few books written about war from the point of view of women, this timely and wide ranging record is going to contribute greatly to the long neglected female perspective on wars, invariably started by men." ~ Dr Jonathon King, Military Historian

Love and loss in books and at the movies

The movie of Audrey Niffenegger's book The Time Traveller's Wife opens in Australia in early November. It stars Australia's Eric Bana as the time traveller (whose occupation happens to be librarian).

Clare (Rachel McAdams) has been in love with Henry (Eric Bana) her entire life. She believes they are destined to be together, even though she never knows when they will be separated: Henry is a time traveller—cursed with a rare genetic anomaly that causes him to live his life on a shifting timeline, skipping back and forth through his lifespan with no control. Despite the fact that Henry's travels force them apart with no warning, Clare desperately tries to build a life with her one true love.

Coinciding with the movie, is Niffenegger's latest book Her Fearful Symmetry.

Julia and Valentina Poole are normal American teenagers - normal, at least, for identical 'mirror' twins who have no interest in college or jobs or possibly anything outside their cozy suburban home. But everything changes when they receive notice that an aunt whom they didn't know existed has died and left them her flat in an apartment block overlooking Highgate Cemetery in London. They feel that at last their own lives can begin ... but have no idea that they've been summoned into a tangle of fraying lives, from the obsessive-compulsive crossword setter who lives above them to their aunt's mysterious and elusive lover who lives below them, and even to their aunt herself, who never got over her estrangement from the twins' mother and who can't even seem to quite leave her flat.

With Highgate Cemetery itself a character and echoes of Henry James and Charles Dickens, HER FEARFUL SYMMETRY is a delicious and deadly twenty-first-century ghost story about Niffenegger's familiar themes of love, loss and identity. It is certain to cement her standing as one of the most singular and remarkable novelists of our time.

Suitcase History: Life on the Limestone Plains

Come along to a library based workshop exploring how to tell the stories of early rural Canberra, where to find information, handling items from that time, and examining attitudes to life in the Victorian Age relating to this region.

Storyteller/teacher Elizabeth Burness will share her collection of books, artefacts, including antique clothing, and, of course, stories. She will answer questions in a lively, interesting and sometimes unusual way!

Monday 2 November 2009
10.00am - 11.00am
Woden Library

Click here to book online or phone 6205 9000.