Jeffreys Last Tuesday Book Club - Tuesday 26 March
The Rosie Project - Graeme Simsion
Don Tillman, professor of genetics, has never been on a second date. Then a chance encounter gives him an idea. He will design a questionaire - a sixteen-page, scientifically researched document - to find the perfect partner. She will most definitely not be a barmaid, a smoker, a drinker or a late-arriver. Rosie Jarman is all these things. She is strangely beguiling, fiery and intelligent. And she is also on a quest of her own. She's looking for her biological father, a search that a certain DNA expert might just be able to help her with - even if he does wear quick-dry clothes and eat lobster every single Tuesday night.
7pm Tuesday 26 March. Purchase the book to reserve your place.
Jeffreys Brain Food Book Club - Wednesday 20 March
Half the Sky - Nicholas D. Kristof & Sheryl WuDunn
Pulitzer Prize-winning reporting team, husband and wife Nicholas D. Kristof and Sheryl WuDunn, take us on a journey through Africa and Asia to meet an extraordinary array of exceptional women struggling against terrible circumstances. More girls have been killed in the last fifty years, precisely because they are girls, than men were killed in all the wars of the twentieth century combined. More girls are killed in this routine 'gendercide' in any one decade than people were slaughtered in all the genocides of the twentieth century. In the nineteenth century, the central moral challenge was slavery. In the twentieth, it was totalitarianism. In the twenty-first, Kristof and WuDunn demonstrate, it will be the struggle for gender equality in the developing world. Fierce, moral, pragmatic, full of amazing stories of courage and inspiration, HALF THE SKY is essential reading for every global citizen.
11am Wednesday 20 March. Purchase the book to reserve your place.
Author Visit: Graeme Simsion - Thursday 14 March
Graeme Simsion, author of The Rosie Project will be appearing at Jeffreys Books at 6.30 pm on Thursday 14 March.
'Funny and heartwarming, a gem of a book.' Marian Keyes
Enjoy refreshments on arrival and then discussion on the feel good book of the year...
Open Book: By the Book by Romona Koval 
5 February, Malvern Library, 6.30pm–7.30pm. Book Online.
Ramona Koval’s latest book, By the Book: A Reader's Guide to Life, is a love letter to books and writing. Join Ramona as she shares stories about reading and living and the authors that have written themselves into her life. It is about learning to read, about love and science (and her childhood ambition to be Marie Curie), about poetry and travel and falling in love.
Jeffreys Last Tuesday Book Club - February 2013
Lost Voices - Christopher Koch
Young Hugh Dixon believes he can save his father from ruin if he asks his estranged great-uncle Walter-- a wealthy lawyer who lives alone in a Tasmanian farmhouse passed down through the family-for help. As he is drawn into Walter's rarefied world, Hugh discovers that both his uncle and the farmhouse are links to a notorious episode in the mid nineteenth century. Walter's father, Martin, was living in the house when it was raided by members of an outlaw community run by Lucas Wilson, a charismatic ex-soldier attempting to build a utopia. But like later societies with communitarian ideals, Nowhere Valley was controlled by the gun, with Wilson as benevolent dictator. Dramatic, insightful and evocative, Lost Voices is an intriguing double narrative that confirms Koch as one of our most significant and compelling novelists.
7pm Tuesday 26 February. Purchase the book to reserve your place.
Jeffreys Brain Food Book Club - February 2013
Double Cross - Ben Macintyre
D-Day, 6 June 1944, the turning point of the Second World War, was a victory of arms. But it was also a triumph for a different kind of operation: one of deceit... At the heart of the deception was the 'Double Cross System', a team of double agents whose bravery, treachery, greed and inspiration succeeded in convincing the Nazis that Calais and Norway, not Normandy, were the targets of the 150,000-strong Allied invasion force. These were not conventional warriors, but their masterpiece of deceit saved thousands of lives. Their codenames were Bronx, Brutus, Treasure, Tricycle and Garbo. This is their story.
11am Wednesday 20 February. Purchase the book to reserve your place.
Diane Holuigue presents "The French Kitchen - a Lifetime of Cooking, Teaching and Writing"
Diane will be presenting at 6.30 pm on Wednesday 14 November.
Diane has been running very popular cooking classes in Armadale for years - you may have even been to one.
Join us for the evening or call to pre-order your signed copy now. 9509 5133
The Lost Thing Passport - 11-24 August
Inspired by Shaun Tan’s ‘The Lost Thing’, collect your free passport in store, a beautiful guide to some of Melbourne’s finest bookstores. Start collecting stamps between August 11-24 to go in the draw to win a signed copy of the very special suitcase edition of Shaun Tan’s award-winning ‘The Arrival’ and book vouchers from Jeffreys Books and other participating stores:
Jeffreys Last Tuesday Book Club
Foal's Bread - Gillian Mears
Set in hardscrabble farming country and the high-jumping circuit that prevailed in rural New South Wales prior to the Second World War, Foal's Bread tells the story of two generations of the Nancarrow family and their fortunes as dictated by the vicissitudes of the land. It is a love story of impossible beauty and sadness, a chronicle of dreams 'turned inside out', and miracles that never last, framed against a world both tender and unspeakably hard.
7pm Tuesday 28 August. Purchase the book to reserve your place.
Jeffreys Brain Food Book Club
The Boy Who Wouldn't Die - David Nyoul Vincent & Carol Nader
David Nyuol Vincent was a little boy when he fled southern Sudan with his father, as war raged in their country. He left behind his distraught mother and sisters, his village and his childhood. He would never return. For months David and his father walked across southern Sudan, barefoot, desperately searching for safety, food and water. They survived the perilous Sahara Desert crossing into Ethiopia only to be separated. David was taken in and trained as a child soldier, surviving the next 17 years of his life alone in refugee camps. Told with frankness and humour, this is the powerful account of a young man's resilience. The story of a boy who refused to die.
11am Wednesday 15 August. Purchase the book to reserve your place.
July - Kathryn Fox at Stonnington Library, Malvern - Wednesday 11 July at 6.30 pm
Kathryn Fox will appear to discuss her most recent crime novel.
Forensic physician Dr Anya Crichton needs a break. Cocooned from the world aboard a luxury cruise ship, nothing can interrupt time with her precious six-year-old son. Peace is shattered when the body of a teenage girl is discovered shoved in a cupboard, dripping wet. With no obvious cause of death and the nearest port days away, Anya volunteers her forensic expertise. She quickly uncovers a sordid pattern of sexual assaults, unchecked drug use and mysterious disappearances. With crew too afraid to talk, she is drawn into the underbelly of the cruise line, its dangerous secrets and the murky waters of legal accountability. Shadowed by a head of security with questionable loyalties, Anya can trust no one. Her family's lives depend on what she does next. One thing is certain. There is a killer on board.
Phone Stonnington Library on 8290 1366 for reservations
Jeffreys Last Tuesday Book Club - July
Billy Lynn's Long Halftime Walk - Ben Fountain
"This book will be the Catch-22 of the Iraq War". (Karl Marlantes). Nineteen-year-old Billy Lynn is home from war. Back in Texas, he has become a national celebrity. A Fox News crew filmed Billy and the rest of Bravo squad defeating Iraqi insurgents in a ferocious firefight. Now Billy is a decorated soldier and Bravo's three minutes of extreme bravery under fire are a YouTube sensation. Seizing on this PR gift, the Bush administration has sent the surviving members of Bravo on a nationwide 'Victory Tour' to reassure the homeland. Today, during the final hours of the tour, they arrive at Texas Stadium, guests of honour in a nationally broadcast Thanksgiving Day game. The story follows Billy and his fellow Bravos through a climactic afternoon, as they mix with the rich and powerful, endure the politics and affections of their fellow citizens, aspire to sex and marriage with the famous Cowboys cheerleaders, share centre stage with Destiny's Child and attempt to close a movie deal. They will learn hard truths about love and death, family and friendship, duty and honour. Tomorrow, they must go back to war. Tender and full of humanity, this is a wickedly funny, powerfully contemporary novel about a young man, the citizens who sent him to war, the family he left behind and the era that let it happen. In "Billy Lynn", Ben Fountain has created a new American hero for our times.
7pm Tuesday 31 July. Purchase the book to reserve your place.
Jeffreys Brain Food Book Club - July
In The Garden of the Beasts - Erik Larson
In 1933, a year that would prove to be a turning point in history, William E. Dodd becomes America's first ambassador to Hitler's Germany. He brings his family with him to Berlin, where they experience days full of excitement, intrigue, romance, and - ultimately - horror. The ambassador's daughter is at first entranced by the pomp and parties, and by the young men with their infectious enthusiasm for the 'New Germany'. As evidence of Jewish persecution mounts, however, Dodd telegraphs his concerns to a largely indifferent State Department back home. He watches with growing alarm as Jews are attacked, the press is censored, and a climactic spasm of violence and murder reveals Hitler's true character. Suffused with the tense atmosphere of the period, and with unforgettable portraits of historical figures such as Goring and Goebbels, In the Garden of Beasts lends a stunning eyewitness perspective on events as they unfold in real time, revealing an era of surprising nuance and complexity. The result is a dazzling, addictively readable work that speaks volumes about why the world did not recognise the grave threat posed by Hitler until Europe was awash in blood and terror.
11am Wednesday 18 July. Purchase the book to reserve your place.
Jane Webster presents French Ties
Have you ever dreamed of living in the French countryside? Or maybe running your own guest house? Maybe you tinker with the idea of writing your own book? Come along to hear Jane Webster discuss her new title and how she's done it all - through hard work and a big dream.
Thursday 27 April until 8pm
Jane will present at 7pm. Come along for a shopping night and to hear Jane speak.
If you can't attend but would like a signed copy for yourself or a gift, please contact us before the event to reserve your copy.
Jeffreys Last Tuesday Book Club:
The Cat’s Table – Michael Ondaatje
In the early 1950s, an eleven-year-old boy boards a huge liner bound for England - a 'castle that was to cross the sea'. At mealtimes, he is placed at the lowly 'Cat's Table' with an eccentric group of grown-ups and two other boys, Cassius and Ramadhin. As the ship makes its way across the Indian Ocean, through the Suez Canal, into the Mediterranean, the boys become involved in the worlds and stories of the adults around them, tumbling from one adventure and delicious discovery to another, 'bursting all over the place like freed mercury'. And at night, the boys spy on a shackled prisoner - his crime and fate a galvanizing mystery that will haunt them forever.
As the narrative moves from the decks and holds of the ship and the boy's adult years, it tells a spellbinding story about the difference between the magical openness of childhood and the burdens of earned understanding.
7pm on Tueday 24 April. Purchase the book to reserve your place.
Purchase the book to reserve your place. Tuesday, 28 February at 7.00 pm.
Jeffreys Brain Food Book Group:
A Tragedy in Two Acts – Fiona Harari
This was not the ending either of them expected. Marcus Einfeld, former Federal Court judge and human rights champion, and his old friend Teresa Brennan, an exuberant, sometimes controversial US-based academic, had each spent years establishing demanding careers and international reputations, to create two lives that, on paper at least, exuded success. Then Einfeld was caught speeding. But rather than pay a small fine, the former judge told a court that Brennan had been driving his car. In reality she had been dead for three years. Through a chain of events that at times seemed exceedingly unlikely, Einfeld's lie was exposed, with once unimaginable consequences. His world, and virtually every honour he had earned, rapidly disappeared. And his old friend Brennan, who had died in suspicious circumstances, was suddenly, posthumously, attracting attention for all the wrong reasons. This is the remarkable story of two outstanding Australians whose lives have been lived large, and who, ultimately, have been bound by tragedy.
11am on Wednesday 18 April. Purchase the book to reserve your place.
Purchase the book to reserve your place. Wednesday 15 February at 11 am.