Gettings to Know Your Riverbenders - Vicky

How long have you been working at Riverbend Books? 
5.5 years

And what's your job? 
Events manager/bookclub coordinator

What do you like best about working at Riverbend? 
The people! Staff, Customers and beautiful Bookclub members, 

What's been your favourite event or story? 
There have been so many great events I couldn't possibly choose one - but I have a soft spot for our Harry Potter nights. The kids' costumes are fantastic. 

If we were to come to you for recommendations, what kind of books do you like best?
My favourite sections are Classics and general fiction. I will probably try and shove a book by Elizabeth Strout in your hands.

Lastly, what are you currently reading?
Crossing to Safety for Classics Bookclub - I am loving it. 

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Crossing to Safety

by Wallace Stegner

My Name is Lucy Barton

by Elizabeth Strout

Getting to Know Your Riverbenders - Pauline McLeod

How long have you been working at Riverbend Books? 
8 years

And what's your job? 
Children's Literature Consultant

What do you like best about working at Riverbend? 
Working with a very warm and genuine group of people, the lovely customers that I have worked with over the years and reading all the wonderful children's books.

What's been your favourite event or story? 
My favourite event that I have worked at was the launch of Wundersmith by Jessica Townsend. We had around 450 very excited children and their parents attend. There was a life size snow globe to jump in, food trucks, a wonderful chat with the author and book signings.

If we were to come to you for recommendations, what kind of books do you like best? 
I enjoy reading YA and Middle Years Fiction. Although I do love a good Australian contemporary story I am always drawn to stories set in historical or fantasy worlds.

Lastly, what are you currently reading? 
I have just read and really loved Diary of a Naturalist by Dara McAnulty (which was a really different, slow and contemplative read) and The Left-Handed Booksellers of London by Garth Nix. 

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Want to be more like Pauline? Find what she’s reading in our online store:

Diary of a Young Naturalist

by Dara McAnulty

The Left-Handed Booksellers of London
(pre-order, available October)

by Garth Nix

Covid-19 Madness

We’re approaching the glimmering light at the end of the tunnel, and we at Riverbend wish to heartily thank our loyal readers.

This time of madness has been trying for many and we at Riverbend feel extremely lucky and heartwarmed by the local (and sometimes not-so-local) swell of good wishes and support. Our online orders have quadrupled, local delivery was a hit, and we’ve had so many customers make use of our handy ‘drive thru’. Schools are still thriving and our many bookclubs have graciously survived the transition to Zoom. We are fortunate in comparison to many other businesses who may not be able to see any light at the end of this long tunnel and who have suffered great losses.

If you are a regular attendee of our bookchats or events, you might have heard Suzy talk in detail about supporting local industry. One simple thing you could do to support our wonderful local businesses is to buy a GIFT VOUCHER from one (or more) of the businesses you love in the street. You will be giving practical help (to cash flow!) and will help keep our great high street alive and well. Head on over to our Facebook Page for recommendations — and make a recommendation of your own to go in the draw to win a $25 Riverbend Voucher.

Riverbend is open to the public from today, Friday May 22nd, and our Winter opening hours will be 8am to 5:30pm, Monday to Sunday. In accordance with continued restrictions we will only be allowing three customers in the shop at one time, with a sanitization station at the door. Up until today we have been cleaning the shop top to bottom and back to front to get it ready for the public. Bookclubs and group meetings will still happen via Zoom until restrictions are eased to allow group gatherings. We are playing it by ear, but hopefully by July we’ll all be back to normal!

We hope you are all well and safe, and that we will see you all in the near future!

Regards

Suzy and the Riverbend Team

Chloe Recommends for Christmas

THE STARLESS SEA

by Erin Morgenstern

“All you’ll get out of me is a garbled mess of ‘ohmygod, you just have to read it’. Magic, mystery, romance, and the power of stories and books — what more could you possibly want?”

When Zachary Rawlins stumbles across a strange book hidden in his university library it leads him on a quest unlike any other. Its pages entrance him with their tales of lovelorn prisoners, lost cities and nameless acolytes, but they also contain something impossible - a recollection from his own childhood.

Determined to solve the puzzle of the book, Zachary follows the clues he finds on the cover - a bee, a key and a sword. They guide him to a masquerade ball, to a dangerous secret club, and finally through a magical doorway created by the fierce and mysterious Mirabel. This door leads to a subterranean labyrinth filled with stories, hidden far beneath the surface of the earth.

When the labyrinth is threatened, Zachary must race with Mirabel, and Dorian, a handsome barefoot man with shifting alliances, through its twisting tunnels and crowded ballrooms, searching for the end of his story.

You are invited to join Zachary on the starless sea - the home of storytellers, story-lovers and those who will protect our stories at all costs.

Vicky Recommends for Christmas

THE FALCONER

by Dana Czapnik

“Coming of age story set in NY in the 1990s from the perspective of an incredibly bright, basketball playing teenage girl who doesn't quite fit in. Reads like Salinger's Catcher in The Rye meets Jim Carroll's The Basketball Diaries. Fast paced, whip-smart and deeply moving. LOVE.”

A new coming-of-age classic, an early '90s New York-set novel of love, basketball, art and feminism. Seventeen-year-old Lucy Adler, a street-smart, trash-talking baller, is often the only girl on the public courts.

Lucy's inner life is a contradiction. She's by turns quixotic and cynical, insecure and self-possessed and, despite herself, is in unrequited love with her best friend and pick-up teammate Percy, son of a prominent New York family who is trying to resist his upper crust fate. As Lucy questions accepted notions of success, bristling against her own hunger for male approval, she is drawn into the world of a pair of provocative female artists living in what remains of New York's bohemia. In her hit US debut, Dana Czapnik memorably captures the voice of a young woman in the first flush of freedom searching for an authentic way to live and love.

Suzy Recommends for Christmas

THE DUTCH HOUSE

by Ann Patchett

“The kind of book that makes you neglect your chores. A book about homes, architecture, and the messiness of family life.”

Danny Conroy grows up in the Dutch House, a lavish mansion. Though his father is distant and his mother is absent, Danny has his beloved sister Maeve - Maeve, with her wall of black hair, her wit, her brilliance. Life is coherent, played out under the watchful eyes of the house's former owners in the frames of their oil paintings.

Then one day their father brings Andrea home. Though they cannot know it, her arrival to the Dutch House sows the seed of the defining loss of Danny and Maeve's lives. The siblings are drawn back time and again to the place they can never enter, knocking in vain on the locked door of the past. For behind the mystery of their own exile is that of their mother's - an absence more powerful than any presence they have known.

Told with Ann Patchett's inimitable blend of humour, rage and heartbreak, The Dutch House is a dark fairy tale and story of a paradise lost; of the powerful bonds of place and time that magnetize and repel us for our whole lives.

Tanée Recommends for Christmas

THE WIFE AND THE WIDOW

by Christian White

“If you like Jane Harper, you’ll love this. Super readable - perfect holiday/weekend read for crime lovers. Devouring it takes no effort at all as you'll be desperate to see how the mystery unfolds...”

Set against the backdrop of an eerie island town in the dead of winter, The Wife and the Widow is a mystery/thriller told from two perspectives: Kate, a widow whose grief is compounded by what she learns about her dead husband's secret life; and Abby, an island local whose world is turned upside down when she's forced to confront the evidence that her husband is a murderer. But nothing on this island is quite as it seems, and only when these women come together can they discover the whole story about the men in their lives. Brilliant and beguiling, The Wife and the Widow takes you to a cliff edge and asks the question: how well do we really know the people we love?

Holly Recommends for Christmas...

DISAPPEARING EARTH

by Julia Philips

“A softer kind of crime thriller where an incredible emotional acuity to the personal worlds of (seemingly) peripheral characters takes centre stage. Incredibly subtle yet completely ‘unputdownable’!”

Spellbinding, moving - evoking a fascinating region on the other side of the world - this suspenseful and haunting story announces the debut of a profoundly gifted writer. One August afternoon, on the shoreline of the Kamchatka peninsula at the northeastern edge of Russia, two girls - sisters, eight and eleven - go missing. In the ensuing weeks, then months, the police investigation turns up nothing. Echoes of the disappearance reverberate across a tightly woven community, with the fear and loss felt most deeply among its women. Taking us through a year in Kamchatka, Disappearing Earth enters with astonishing emotional acuity the worlds of a cast of richly drawn characters, all connected by the crime: a witness, a neighbor, a detective, a mother. We are transported to vistas of rugged beauty - densely wooded forests, open expanses of tundra, soaring volcanoes, and the glassy seas that border Japan and Alaska - and into a region as complex as it is alluring, where social and ethnic tensions have long simmered, and where outsiders are often the first to be accused. In a story as propulsive as it is emotionally engaging, and through a young writer's virtuosic feat of empathy and imagination, this powerful novel brings us to a new understanding of the intricate bonds of family and community, in a Russia unlike any we have seen before.