WHAT WOMEN WANT NEXT
by Susan Maushart

A witty, brazen look at what it will take for the modern woman to call herself happy, from the internationally acclaimed author of Wifework and The Mask of Motherhood.

With all the choices available to today’s women, why don’t they more feel fulfilled? What Women Want Next is Susan Maushart’s meditation—by turns profound and laugh-out-loud funny—on that central dilemma of postfeminist life. At one point she had it all, so why wasn’t she happy? What Women Want Next, Maushart combines research with personal history in a dynamic attempt to answer this question.

Feminism may have led women to life’s banquet table, but the meal they make of it is up to them. How to balance life and work, sex and sleep, child care and self-care? And why has women’s guilt—that glass ceiling of the soul—become the biggest barrier they face? What Women Want Next is the first book to look at the spectrum of a woman’s life and attempt to demonstrate how she can shape her own destiny throughout all its stages.

About the Author

Susan Maushart was born in New York and has lived in Australia since 1985. She is a senior research associate at Curtin University, and a columnist for the Australian Magazine. She lives in Perth with her three children.

Buy What Women Want Next here

THE GOSPEL ACCORDING TO SYDNEY WELLES
By Susi Rajah

A devilishly smart romantic comedy about love, life and God from a wonderful new voice in fiction.

Elizabeth Gilbert meets Jennifer Weiner in this hilarious comedy of errors starring resident Los Angeleno Sydney Welles. Sydney seems to have it all—a lucrative career, a comfortable life, and a man who looks good on paper—until the Catholic Church, looking to repair some serious image problems, approaches the ad agency she works for to create a positive campaign. Sydney, told by her boss it’s her account to lose, stumbles through the novel trying to figure out how to sell religion to a soulless society. She begins a one-sided argument with the Lord himself via riotous, pleading e-mails, all the time asking why He/She had to enter her neat, secular life and make such a mess of it.

Complicating things are her best friend Anna’s on-again, off-again wedding; the disturbingly handsome priest serving as the church’s liaison; and Jake, the new guy, who looks good in real life but comes equipped with all the real-life complications. Susi Rajah’s wickedly funny debut novel introduces an unforgettable new voice in fiction and gives us a ribald, self-deprecating young woman who eventually discovers that love requires even more faith than religion.

About the Author

Susi Rajah is the author of How to Spot a Bastard by His Star Sign and I’m Not a Feminist, But… She worked in advertising for many years, and wrote this novel in Los Angeles before moving to New York City, where she now lives.

Buy The Gospel According to Sydney Welles here.

THE SONG BEFORE IT IS SUNG
By Justin Cartwright

From the Booker Prize nominee and Commonwealth Writer’s Prize winner, a sweeping historical novel about the nature of human freedom and human passion.

On July 20, 1944, Adolf Hitler narrowly escaped an assassination attempt. He had the main conspirators brutally strung up on meat hooks. Among the executed was Axel von Gottberg, a German Rhodes Scholar at Oxford who returned home in 1934, to the dismay of his Oxford friends, particularly Elya Mendel.

Sixty years later, Elya, now a distinguished professor, leaves behind a collection of papers and letters to a former student, Conrad Senior, and asks him to find out the truth about Axel, whom he had condemned as a Nazi sympathizer. But the more Conrad tries to uncover the truth, the more complex he finds the relationship between the two friends, especially in their involvement with two beautiful English cousins. As Conrad investigates obsessively, his own life comes apart. Weaving darkly through these complex stories is an infamous film of Axel's execution; a film which Conrad is desperate to find, for reasons he can barely understand himself.

Wonderfully written—and based on true events—The Song Before It Is Sung is a novel of profound and sensitive insight into the human condition, spanning Oxford in the 1930s, prewar Prussia, and contemporary Britain and surpassing all of Cartwright's previous works in its scope and ambition.

About the Author

Juatin Cartwright is the author of In Every Face I Meet, which was shortlisted for the Booker Prize and won the Commonwealth Writer’s Prize; Leading the Cheers, which won the Whitbread; White Lightning, which was shortlisted for the 2002 Whitbread; and, most recently, The Promise of Happiness, which won the 2005 Hawthornden Prize and the South African Sunday Times Fiction Award, forthcoming this spring as a paperback. He was born in South Africa but has lived all his adult life, since graduating from Oxford, in London.

Buy The Song Before it is Sung here.