Each week Better Read Than Dead's founder, Derek Dryden, reviews three books with John Kerr on New Day Australia, broadcast by Sydney's Radio 2UE and heard all around Australia at 3.45am on Sunday.
Books reviewed by Derek on 6 June include:
The Ask
Sam Lipsyte
PB $32.99
When Milo Burke, a balding, slope-bellied "donations" officer at a minor New York university, has a disastrous run-in with a rich undergraduate, he winds up on the unemployed scrap heap. Grasping at odd jobs to support his wife and young son, he's offered one last chance: he must reel in a potential donor - a major "Ask" - who, mysteriously, has requested his involvement.
It turns out that the "Ask" is Milo's sinister college buddy Purdy Stuart, and the "give" won't come cheap. Before long Milo finds himself serving as a queasy mix of factotum, bagman, client state and sounding board to Purdy, who assigns him the task of delivering hush money to his secret illegitimate son, a legless and spectacularly embittered Iraq War veteran...
Skewering modern-day themes including work, war, sex, class, child-rearing, romantic comedies, cooking shows on death row and the eroticisation of chicken wire, The Ask is a burst of genius by a young American master who demonstrates that truly provocative and important fictions are often the funniest.
Grounded: A Down-to-Earth Journey Around the World
Seth Stevenson
PB $35.00
Let's face it, for all its convenience; flying sucks the adventure out of a journey. Check your shoes. Bag your liquids. So when Seth Stevenson decided to embark on the ultimate adventure - circumnavigating the world, no less - he vowed to recapture what he once loved about travel by sticking to one simple rule: no planes, ever. In the spirit of Around the World in Eighty Days, he sets off with fellow traveller Rebecca as expert navigatrix determined to savour every unexpected bump in the road - and see everything you miss by flying over it. He bunks on cargo freighters, cruise ships and ferries, rides on rickshaws, motorbikes and double-decker buses, drives a car across the Australian outback, pedals a bicycle through Vietnam, rattles across Russia on the Trans-Siberian Railway - and even abandons Rebecca in Singapore to maintain his 'no fly' rule. This funny, wise and thoroughly entertaining armchair tour around the world is a timely reminder of what travelling should be. With travel writing it's not just about where you go, it's who you're on the journey with.
Innocent
Scott Turow
PB $32.95
In Presumed Innocent, Rusty Sabich, family man and the number-two prosecutor of Kindle County, was handed an explosive case – the brutal murder of a woman who happened to be his former lover. A shocking turn of events suddenly transformed him from the accuser into the accused, and plunged him into a personal nightmare.
Now 20 years have passed, and Rusty Sabich, 60 years old and the chief judge of an appellate court, sits on a bed where his dead wife Barbara lies. She has died under mysterious circumstances, and her death will once again pit Rusty against his old nemesis, Tommy Molto, the district attorney who tried to prosecute him for the murder of his lover all those years ago...
Top sellers for the week ending 05 June
1 What's Happening to Our Boys by Maggie Hamilton
2 What's Happening to Our Girls by Maggie Hamilton
3 The Girl Who Kicked The Hornet's Nest by Stieg Larsson
4 Dead in the Family by Charmaine Harris
5 At Home by Bill Bryson
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