Janice

Our fearless leader and owner of Moruya Books.

Get to know more about Janice and her taste in books below:

More about me

1. Who are your auto-buy (you'll buy absolutely anything they write, even their shopping list) authors?

Sara Winman, Chris Hammer, Inga Simpson and Kate Morton

2. What's your favourite genre/s?

Nature writing and Historical books, both fiction and non-fiction.

3. Do you judge a book by its cover?

Yes, at the start, but...

4. What's your most anticipate release/s of 2024?

Surprise me. I'll know when I see it.

5. How do you organise your personal bookshelves?

I have my nature and environmental books on one bookcase, then my non-fiction and fiction on another two bookcases. All my children's books and poetry are on my fourth bookcase and are all organised by height.

6. What books are high on your TBR (to be read pile) this year?

Demon Copperhead, Prophet Song and Unravelling the Silk Road.

But the list just keeps growing!

My favourite book quote:

"I am pessimistic about the human race because it is too ingenious for its own good. Our approach to nature is to beat it into submission. We would stand a better chance of survival if we accommodated ourselves to this planet and viewed it appreciatively instead of skeptically and dictatorially."

E.B.White

Favourites of 2023:

Homecoming, Kate Morton

The highly anticipated new novel from the worldwide bestselling author of The Clockmaker's Daughter, a spellbinding story that begins with a shocking crime, the effects of which echo across continents and generations.

Adelaide Hills, Christmas Eve, 1959:

At the end of a scorching hot day, beside a creek in the grounds of a grand country house, a local man makes a terrible discovery. Police are called, and the small town of Tambilla becomes embroiled in one of the most baffling murder investigations in the history of South Australia.

Many years later and thousands of miles away, Jess is a journalist in search of a story. Having lived and worked in London for nearly two decades, she now finds herself unemployed and struggling to make ends meet. A phone call summons her back to Sydney, where her beloved grandmother, Nora, who raised Jess when her mother could not, has suffered a fall and is seriously ill in hospital.

At Nora's house, Jess discovers a true-crime book chronicling a long-buried police case: the Turner Family Tragedy of 1959. It is only when Jess skims through its pages that she finds a shocking connection between her own family and this notorious event - a murder mystery that has never been satisfactorily resolved.

An epic story that spans generations, Homecoming asks what we would do for those we love, how we protect the lies we tell, and what it means to come home. Above all, it is an intricate and spellbinding novel from one of the finest writers working today.

The Bookbinder Of Jericho, Pip Williams

What is lost when knowledge is withheld?

In 1914, when the war draws the young men of Britain away to fight, it is the women who must keep the nation running. Two of those women are Peggy and Maude, twin sisters who work in the bindery at Oxford University Press in Jericho. Peggy is intelligent, ambitious and dreams of going to Oxford University, but for most of her life she has been told her job is to bind the books, not read them. Maude, meanwhile, wants nothing more than what she has. She is extraordinary but vulnerable. Peggy needs to watch over her.

When refugees arrive from the devastated cities of Belgium, it sends ripples through the community and through the sisters' lives. Peggy begins to see the possibility of another future where she can use her intellect and not just her hands, but as war and illness reshape her world, it is love, and the responsibility that comes with it, that threaten to hold her back.

In this beautiful companion to the international bestseller The Dictionary of Lost Words, Pip Williams explores another little-known slice of history seen through women's eyes. Evocative, subversive and rich with unforgettable characters, The Bookbinder of Jericho is a story about knowledge who gets to make it, who gets to access it, and what is lost when it is withheld.

Four Seasons In Japan, Nick Bradley

A gorgeously crafted book within a book about literature, identity and what it is to belong by the much-loved author of The Cat and The City.

Flo is sick of Tokyo. She is stuck in a rut, her translation work has dried up, and she's in a relationship that's run its course. That's until she stumbles upon a mysterious book left by a drunken passenger on the Tokyo Subway. She starts to read...

SOUND OF WATER

Kyo has failed his university entrance exams, split up with his girlfriend and is sent by his busy mother to a cram school in Onomichi, a small coastal town where he will stay with his grandmother, Ayako. Ayako is a fierce and strict old lady, who runs a coffee shop in town, is missing fingers, and won't talk about the past, or particularly what Kyo really wants to know- who his father was, and why he died by suicide when Kyo was only two. Following a year in Kyo and Ayako's lives, through the changing seasons in rural Japan, Sound of Water is an intergenerational story of family, relationships, creativity and how we overcome and live with failure in life.

...quickly, Flo realises that she needs to venture outside the pages of the book to track down its elusive author. And, as her two protagonists reveal themselves to have more in common with her life than first meets the eye, the lines between text and translator converge. Her journey is just beginning.

Currently Reading:

A Clear Flowing Yarra

By Harry Saddler

They say you can't step in the same river twice, and it's true that the Yarra has been hugely changed - but this book is a glorious and timely reminder that things can also be changed for the better.

Nature writer Harry Saddler hops, skips and jumps his way along, beside, on and even in the Yarra River from source to mouth, reveling in its hidden beauty, getting close to platypuses, kingfishers, Krefft's gliders and the occasional seal, and meeting many of the swimmers, bushwalkers, ecologists and traditional owners who are quietly and tenaciously restoring the river, patch by patch.

Optimistic, inspiring and heartfelt, A Clear Flowing Yarra is a passionate love letter to the river that shapes Melbourne, and an evocative vision of what it is now and what it can be.

The Singularities

By John Banville

From the Booker Prize-winning John Banville comes a playful, multilayered novel of nostalgia, life and death, and quantum theory.

A man with a borrowed name steps from a flashy red sports car? Also borrowed? Onto the estate of his youth. But all is not as it seems. There is a new family living in the drafty old house: the Godleys, descendants of the late, world-famous scientist Adam Godley, whose theory of existence threw the universe into chaos. And this mystery man, who has just completed a prison sentence, feels as if time has stopped, or was torn, or was opened in new and strange ways. He must now vie with the idiosyncratic Godley family, with their harried housekeeper who becomes his landlady, with the recently commissioned biographer of Godley Sr., and with a wealthy and beautiful woman from his past who comes bearing an unusual request.

With sparkling intelligence and rapier wit, John Banville revisits some of his career's most memorable figures, in a novel as mischievous as it is brilliantly conceived.

Chasing Plants

By Chris Thorogood

• Chris Thorogood has a social media following of 18,000 and makes regular appearances on TV and radio