2ser Book Club

Room For a Stranger throws together an unlikely pair of characters in Melbourne’s outer suburbs. Meg Hughes is old. She’s feeling every bit of her age and doesn’t like where things are heading. As carer for her sister, she never married, and now she wonders if anyone will be there to hold her hand when her time comes. When her home in Melbourne’s suburbs is broken into, Meg joins a home share program to have some company and protection around the house.

Andy is studying biomedicine. He lives in central Melbourne amidst a vibrant community of international students. When his father’s cleaning business in Hong Kong begins to struggle financially Andy has to give up his apartment and find cheaper accommodation. Andy’s also struggling to live up to expectation that he exceed and become a doctor. As exams approach he’s desperate to conceal the fact he feels in over his head and might fail.

Room For a Stranger throws together an unlikely pair of characters in Melbourne’s outer suburbs. Meg Hughes is old. She’s feeling every bit of her age and doesn’t like where things are heading. As carer for her sister, she never married, and now she wonders if anyone will be there to hold her hand when her time comes. When her home in Melbourne’s suburbs is broken into, Meg joins a home share program to have some company and protection around the house.

Andy is studying biomedicine. He lives in central Melbourne amidst a vibrant community of international students. When his father’s cleaning business in Hong Kong begins to struggle financially Andy has to give up his apartment and find cheaper accommodation. Andy’s also struggling to live up to expectation that he exceed and become a doctor. As exams approach he’s desperate to conceal the fact he feels in over his head and might fail.

The Monsarrat series, from legendary father/daughter writing team Tom and Meg Keneally, takes the reader back to early colonial Australia. The series follows a ticket of leave man; Hugh Llewelyn Monsarrat. Transported to the colonies for forgery, he has served his time but is not free to go about his life. Monserrat is instead indentured as an investigator, solving some of the most heinous crimes in the colony.

Monsarrat is assisted in his work by seemingly innocuous domestic servant Hannah Mulrooney. Together they are able to access across levels in society to solve crimes.

The Ink Stain is the latest in the series and sees Monsarrat and Mulrooney in Sydney investigating the killing of a newspaper editor, Henry Hallward.

Omar is an Arab-Australian poet from Western Sydney. His first collection of poetry, These Wild Houses was shortlisted for the Judith Wright Calanthe Award and the Kenneth Slessor Prize for Poetry.

Omar latest collection is The Lost Arabs. The collection explores family and social life; with Omar delving into what it means to be Arab Australian, to be gay and how these identities are never just personal. It’s deeply personal but also social look at the ways in which identity and community are structured, then legitimised or denied.

Abigail has been invited on an all expenses paid trip on an island off Tasmania’s coast. There she joins a group of strangers to discover ‘the secret’. All any of them know is that for most of their lives they have each received chapters of a mysterious book starting when they were fifteen. This mysterious Guidebook is more than just a curiosity to Abigail. The first chapter arrived the day before her brother went missing and her whole life she has wondered at the connection…

Gravity is the Thing travels between Abigail’s life in Sydney; running a cafe and raising her boy Oscar , and moments in her past that unravel to show us the story of how she came to search for the Guidebook’s secret.

Abigail has been invited on an all expenses paid trip on an island off Tasmania’s coast. There she joins a group of strangers to discover ‘the secret’. All any of them know is that for most of their lives they have each received chapters of a mysterious book starting when they were fifteen. This mysterious Guidebook is more than just a curiosity to Abigail. The first chapter arrived the day before her brother went missing and her whole life she has wondered at the connection…

Gravity is the Thing travels between Abigail’s life in Sydney; running a cafe and raising her boy Oscar , and moments in her past that unravel to show us the story of how she came to search for the Guidebook’s secret.

Islands is the story of a family; Helen and John, their daughters June and Anna. A family who like any other love and quarrel and are not perfect in the ways that you can only be with loved ones. Then one night, fifteen year old Anna doesn’t return home and the family’s lives are inexorably defined by that moment forevermore…

Lachie Munro is a humble painter from Newcastle. He’s the sort of bloke a politician might call a battler, until they figure out what he’s been up to and then they’d either distance themself or go into business with him. When we meet Lachie at the beginning of Hiding to Nothing he’s got a sawn-off shotgun pointed in his face, and who knew at the time but he’d come to miss those halcyon days.

Hiding to Nothing pitches the reader into the seedy world of Newcastle crime and the sweaty world of Newcastle painting during a hot summer.

Lachie wants to play it straight but he’s constantly dragged by circumstance and fate into the dodgier parts of town.

Wrestle tells the story of a boy named Gus. Gus just loves wrestling! Gus loves wrestling so much he wants to dress up as a wrestler for Mardis Gras. But Gus’s mums aren’t sure about this. They think wrestlers show a particularly violent picture of masculinity and they don’t want Gus to grow up thinking he can use violence to solve problems. But Gus just loves wrestling!

What follows is a beautiful story about a family working together on a problem that means so much to each of them…

In Zebra we travel to the Lodge where the Prime Minister is abandoning her budget papers in favour of a ramble through her expansive garden. The PM disdains the press scrum and as we move with her we see she is deeply concerned with how her stewardship of the country is going to see it develop. On the outskirts of the Lodge, she discovers her neighbour surreptitiously moving the shared fence by several inches onto her side, but is met by a volley of verbal abuse every time she approaches the boundary. Then a strange correspondence from a private zoo in America sees the arrival of the gift of a Zebra to the Lodge.

Zebra is the latest story collection from Debra Adelaide.