Book haul #1
So these were the wonders I picked up on the first of my recent trips to Australia, in February.
The secondhand ones are all from a great bookstore in Albany. It wasn't cheap, but it was well organised with a great selection of titles. I could have spent a fortune there, but fortunately I had to think about the weight of my suitcase for the trip back to the US.
I picked up some great Australian works: a secondhand copy of Land's Edge by our Tim Winton, which I have in store back home but wanted to read again; Grace by Robert Drewe and a volume of short stories edited by him; Dislocations and The Ivory Swing, both secondhand and both by Janette Turner Hospital, whom I only recently discovered when I read Due Preparations for the Plague.
In the 'rest of the world' category, all secondhand, I have three old Virago editions: The Curate's Wife by EH White, Company Parade by Storm Jameson, and The Lost Traveller by Antonia White. Then there's The Winter Queen, by Boris Akunin, which I thought would do nicely for the Russian Reading Challenge that I'm supposed to be reading for this year. I also picked up The Flight of the Maidens by Jane Gardam, whose work I like, and Remember Me by Trezza Azzopardi, because it's set in a fictional version of my old UK hometown of Norwich. I bought the Tracy Chevalier, Falling Angels, because she's heartily recommended in many of the book blogs I read.
On my second trip to Australia, I went with hardly anything in my suitcase, so I brought back an even bigger pile of books, all of them secondhand. But that's for another day!