of 2020
Welcome
Roaring Stories is Balmain’s independent bookstore, serving the book-loving community of the neighbourhood and surrounds. More than just a place lined with shelves, Roaring Stories aspires to be a welcoming threshold for journeys to begin: to faraway places and back in time; to personal development and enriched understandings; to fantastical worlds and matters close to heart. You may remember us under our former name Brays Books.
If you need a guide across our wide range of genres and titles, just ask our friendly team of expert booksellers: Bronwyn, Tim, Sylvia, Nell, Stella, Caelli and Shanti.
Happy reading, beautiful booklovers. We hope to see you soon.
New Release Highlights
Fragile Monsters
$32.99A spellbinding novel of war and family betrayal set in Malaysia – The God of Small Things for our century
On a visit to her childhood home in rural Malaysia, Durga faces a reckoning. Stuck with her sharp-tongued grandmother in the rising heat, both women must untangle the truth from the myth of their family’s past. What happened to Durga’s mother after she gave birth? Why did so many of their family members disappear during the war? And who is to blame for the childhood tragedy that haunts Durga? Fragile Monsters traces one family’s story from 1920 to the present day, unravelling a thrilling tale of love, betrayal and redemption against the backdrop of natural disasters and fallen empires. Written in vivid technicolour, with an electric daughter-grandmother relationship at its heart, this is a stunning debut novel about what happens when secrets fester through the generations.
The Arrest
$29.99From the award-winning author of The Feral Detective and Motherless Brooklyn comes an utterly original post-apocalyptic yarn about two siblings, the man that came between them, and a nuclear-powered super car.
The Arrest isn’t post-apocalypse. It isn’t a dystopia. It isn’t a utopia. It’s just what happens when much of what we take for granted – cars, guns, computers, and airplanes, for starters – stops working…
Before the Arrest, Sandy Duplessis had a reasonably good life as a screenwriter in L.A. An old college friend and writing partner, the charismatic and malicious Peter Todbaum, had become one of the most powerful men in Hollywood. That didn’t hurt.
Now, post-Arrest, nothing is what it was. Sandy, who calls himself Journeyman, has landed in rural Maine. There he assists the butcher and delivers the food grown by his sister, Maddy, at her organic farm. But then Todbaum shows up in an extraordinary vehicle: a retrofitted tunnel-digger powered by a nuclear reactor. Todbaum has spent the Arrest smashing his way across a fragmented and phantasmagorical United States, trailing enmities all the way. Plopping back into the siblings’ life with his usual odious panache, his motives are entirely unclear. Can it be that Todbaum wants to produce one more extravaganza? Whatever he’s up to, it may fall to Journeyman to stop him.
Written with unrepentant joy and shot through with just the right amount of contemporary dread, The Arrest is speculative fiction at its absolute finest.
The Prophets
$32.99With lyricism reminiscent of Toni Morrison and James Baldwin, Robert Jones Jr. tells an unflinching story of forbidden love between two enslaved men in Mississippi whose relationship threatens all around them.
In this blinding debut, Robert Jones Jr. blends the lyricism of Toni Morrison with the vivid prose of Zora Neale Hurston to characterise the forceful, enduring bond of love, and what happens when brutality threatens the purest form of serenity.
The Halifax plantation is known as Empty by the slaves who work it under the pitiless gaze of its overseers and its owner, Massa Paul. Two young enslaved men, Samuel and Isaiah dwell among the animals they keep in the barn, helping out in the fields when their day is done. But the barn is their haven, a space of radiance and love – away from the blistering sun and the cruelty of the toubabs – where they can be alone together.
But, Amos – a fellow slave – has begun to direct suspicion towards the two men and their refusal to bend. Their flickering glances, unspoken words and wilful intention, revealing a truth that threatens to rock the stability of the plantation. And preaching the words of Massa Paul’s gospel, he betrays them.
The culminating pages of The Prophets summon a choral voice of those who have suffered in silence, with blistering humanity, as the day of reckoning arrives at the Halifax plantation. Love, in all its permutations, is the discovery at the heart of Robert Jones Jr’s breathtaking debut, The Prophets.
The Funny Thing about Norman Foreman
$32.99The Funny Thing About Norman Foreman is an inspiring, feel-good novel about a small boy with a big heart, a woman who would do anything for her son, and a journey that will change their lives …
Little Miss Sunshine meets Wonder meets A Man Called Ove in this stunning debut novel that will touch your heart.”What do you get when you cross a painfully awkward son, lofty comedic ambition and a dead best friend? Norman.”
Norman and Jax are a legendary comedy duo in the making, with a five-year plan to perform at the Edinburgh Fringe by the time they’re fifteen. But then Jax dies before they even turn twelve.
Norman’s mum Sadie knows she won’t win Mother of the Year anytime soon, and she really doesn’t know, or care, who Norman’s father is. But her heart is broken when she discovers her grieving son’s revised plan: ‘Find Dad’ and ‘Get to the Edinburgh Fringe’.
If meeting his dad and performing at the Festival are the two things that will help Norman through this devastating time, then Sadie is going to make them happen.
So mother and son set off from Cornwall, with their friend Leonard in his vintage Austin Maxi, on a pilgrimage to Edinburgh – to honour Jax and to track down a few maybe-fathers on the way . . .
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