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OCEANIA and AUSTRALIA (AUSTRALASIA) fiction from the continent with two (or maybe three) names
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by Shirley Barrett
1908. Mary Davidson is providing support to her father's boisterous whaling crews while caring for five brothers and sisters in the wake of their mother's death. Then the handsome John Beck - a former Methodist preacher turned novice whaler with a mysterious past - arrives at the Davidson's door, and suddenly Mary's world is upended.
Setting: Australia
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by Emily Bitto
layered tapestry of family half-truths, deceit, and desire stretching across five decades, with blurred lines tangling the lives of Lily and Eva and thwarting Lily's quest for resolution and redemption.
Setting: Australia
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by Eleanor Catton
Prostitute Anna Wetherell is arrested on the same day that three men with various connections to her disappear from a coastal New Zealand town.
Setting: New Zealand
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by Jill Ciment
When Thomas and Helene Strauss arrive in Vanduu, Adam Finster senses that there's something unusual about the couple. He's right: Thomas is a former professor, Helene is a former stripper 30 years his junior, and they've come to Vanduu to avoid the impending crisis of Thomas' cancer. They've come to the wrong place.
Setting: Melanesia
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by Trent Dalton
Consider Eli Bell of Darra, Australia. His mother, Frankie, and her live-in boyfriend, Lyle, are heroin dealers; his brilliant, visionary brother, August, older by a year, is a selective mute who chooses not to speak; and his best friend is an elderly murderer.
Setting: Australia
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by Brooke Davis
Seven-year-old Millie lost her father to cancer and is abandoned by her grieving mother in a department store. By chance Millie meets two other damaged and suffering souls: 87-year-old Karl the Touch Typist and 82-year-old Agatha Pantha, both of whom are coping very badly with the deaths of their long-term spouses.
Setting: Australia
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by Chris Hammer
The rural Australian town's dark secrets come to light after a young priest kills five parishioners before being taken down himself. A year later, journalist Martin Scarsden arrives in Riversend. His assignment: to report how the townspeople are coping as the anniversary of the tragedy approaches.
Setting: Australia
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by Ashley Hay
A new resident of an old home begins to experience the memories and secrets of its former owner, an elderly lady in a nearby nursing home, in ways that cause their families to intersect in sudden and unexpected ways.
Setting: Australia
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by Sally Hepworth
A woman's obsessive fears about how much she disappoints her successful, pillar-of-the-community mother-in-law lead to a controversial disinheritance and a suspicious suicide.
Setting: Australia
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by Robert Hillman
When Tom Hope, a practical sheep farmer in 1960s Australia, married Hannah Babel, a twice-widowed Auschwitz survivor many years his senior, not everyone thought it was a good idea.But then again, Tom was easily swayed by women. His first wife, Trudy, had left him. Twice. Setting: Australia
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by Lily King
Frustrated by his research efforts and depressed over the death of his brothers, Andre Banson runs into two fellow anthropologists, a married couple, in 1930s New Guinea and begins a tumultuous relationship with them.
Setting: New Guinea
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by Christian Kracht
In 1902, a radical vegetarian and nudist from Nuremberg named August Engelhardt set sail for what was then called the Bismarck Archipelago, in German New Guinea. His destination: the island Kabakon. His goal: to establish a colony based on worship of the sun and coconuts. His malnourished body was found on the beach on Kabakon in 1919; he was forty-three years old.
Setting: South Pacific
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by Fiona McFarlane
Ruth is widowed, her sons are grown, and she lives in an isolated beach house outside of town. Her routines are few and small. One day a stranger arrives at her door, looking as if she has been blown in from the sea. This woman -- Frida -- claims to be a care worker sent by the government. Ruth lets her in.
Setting: Australia
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by Anne Ostby
When Sina, Maya, Ingrid, and Lisbeth each receive a letter in the mail posing the same question, the answer is obvious. Their old high school friend Kat -- Kat the adventurer, Kat who spread her wings and took off as soon as they graduated -- has extended the invitation of a lifetime: Come live with me on my cocoa farm in Fiji.
Setting: Fiji (and Norway)
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by Emily Perkins
Dorothy Forrest grows up in a commune with childlike parents and siblings that include a boy, Daniel, who shows up one day and never leaves. Dorothy falls hopelessly in love with Daniel, a wanderer who seems incapable of commitment, and becomes estranged from all of her family except sister Eve.
Setting: New Zealand
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by Tatjana Soli
A black comedy set on a small, unnamed coral atoll in the South Pacific where a group of troubled dreamers must face the possibility that the hopes they've labored after so single-mindedly might not lead them to the happiness they feel they were promised.
Setting: South Pacific
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by Peter Walker
It is 1967, and as New Zealand hesitates over whether to send more troops to Vietnam, students take to the streets of Wellington to protest the war. Among them are friends Race, Candy, Chadwick, FitzGerald, and the charismatic Morgan, who is Maori, and more dedicated than the rest to his political convictions.
Setting: New Zealand
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by Christian White
When Australian Kim Leamy is approached by Stuart, an uptight American who tells her the story of a missing girl, she thinks Stuart is looking for a donation for the investigation. Kim is surprised to discover that the girl went missing years ago, and her surprise turns to amazement when Stuart says that Kim was the little girl. Can it be true? Setting: Australia
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by Charlotte Wood
In an utterly remote and barren part of Australia, ten young women are starved, sedated, dressed in outlandish Puritanical garb, and led about like dogs. Yolanda can't even remember how she got there, but it soon emerges that they are all being punished for past sexual sins.
Setting: Australia
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by Hanya Yanagihara
Joining an anthropologist's 1950 expedition to discover a lost tribe on a remote Micronesian island, a young doctor investigates and proves a theory that the tribe's considerable longevity is linked to a rare turtle, a finding that brings worldwide fame and unexpected consequence.
Setting: Micronesia
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Main Branch Richmond Public Library 101 E. Franklin St. Richmond, VA 23219 (804)646-7223
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