Perfect People by Peter James

John and Naomi are grieving the death of their four-year-old son from a rare genetic disorder. They desperately want another child, but they realize the odds of their next child contracting the same disease are high. Then they hear about geneticist Dr Leo Dettore. He has methods that can spare them the heartache of ever losing another child to any disease. At his clinic is where their nightmare begins. They should have realized something was wrong when they saw the list. Choices of eye colour, hair, sporting abilities. They can literally design their child. Now it's too late to turn back. Naomi is pregnant and already something is badly wrong ...

A chilling story that I couldn't put down.  How much do you trust a stranger?  Should you play around with nature?  They went to the geneticist to have one gene changed on their future child, he gave them twins with lots of experimental changes.

Miss Chopsticks by Xinran

The story centres on three sisters from a poor rural family who move to Nanjing to find work. Their father's status in the village is reduced because he is only able to produce 'chopstick' daughters rather than 'roofbeam' sons, however the three girls prove their worth and more through their success in gaining meaningful employment, and earning much-needed cash, in the big city.

The individual girls' stories are all interesting and are based on individual true accounts of three girls from different backgrounds who moved to the city. The contrast between rural and city life in modern-day China are startling, and the girls' experiences in adjusting to modern city life are in turns poignant, funny, enlightening and sometimes sad.

The Perks of Being A Wallflower by Stephen Chbosky

Charlie is a freshman. And while he’s not the biggest geek in the school, he is by no means popular. Shy, introspective, intelligent beyond his years yet socially awkward, he is a wallflower, caught between trying to live his life and trying to run from it. Charlie is attempting to navigate his way through uncharted territory: the world of first dates and mix tapes, family dramas and new friends; the world of sex, drugs, and The Rocky Horror Picture Show, when all one requires is that perfect song on that perfect drive to feel infinite. But he can’t stay on the sideline forever. Standing on the fringes of life offers a unique perspective. But there comes a time to see what it looks like from the dance floor.

A well-written coming-of-age novel about a socially awkward teen.
I enjoyed the way it was written as a series of letters to an anonymous friend.  

Plum Wine by Angela Davis - Gardiner

 The book is set in Japan during the 1960s and the two main characters are Barbara, an American, and Seiji, Japanese. There's a kind of mystery in that Barbara inherits a chest full of bottles of plum wine, each one bottled and labeled in a different year, from the 1930s onward. 

She meets Seijei, a potter, who volunteers to translate the papers wrapped around the bottles of plum wine.  Through the translated papers she discovers the life of Michi, a friend and fellow teacher, who left her the chest.  She finds out that Michi survived the bombing of Hiroshima, as did Seijei.

She falls in love with Seijei and has an affair with him. Something forbidden both by the school at which Barbara is a guest teacher and by Japanese culture.

I didn't like Seijei. He was weak, deceitful and manipulative.  The story was excellent. A masterfully told tale of love and loss.

The Last Girl by Michael Adams

It is Christmas day and instead of lolling around in a diabetic haze of too much food, too much alcohol and way more lollies than is healthy the world as we know it comes to an end. In a split second all humans become telepathic, the desire to be connected via smart phones and the internet has resulted in a massed mind meld. Instantly a person can hear what everyone else if thinking – what your husband really thinks of his gifts, your boyfriend is actually gay, the man flying your plane once trained as a suicide bomber and your wife is having an affair with your neighbour. But not just one person’s thought invade your mind, thousands of thoughts invade and you can’t shut them out, they can’t be turned off or put into sleep mode. You now experience car crashes, train derailments and plane crashes as well as the utter chaos and violence that break out around you. In a snap the whole world changes and information overload takes on a whole new meaning. Eventually the overload is too much and one by one people become catatonic, they go into shut down mode. But who wakes these people up before they starve to death, die of dehydration? There are survivors – people like Danby who can hear people – but can’t be heard. She is not alone, but not everyone is pure of heart, some survivors have an ulterior motive.

The Last Girl  is a 'end of the world as we know it' scenario the end of the world is not caused by nuclear holocaust, global warming, alien invasion or zombie/mysterious virus - it is our increasing reliance on computers and social networks that does us all in!

It was set in Sydney and the Blue Mountains.  

A really good read. I am glad I started it on a weekend as I had a hard time putting it down. 

Late Nights On Air by Elizabeth Hay

Harry Boyd, a hard-bitten refugee from failure in Toronto television, has returned to a small radio station in the Canadian North. There, in Yellowknife, in the summer of 1975, he falls in love with a voice on air, though the real woman, Dido Paris, is both a surprise and even more than he imagined.

Dido and Harry are part of the cast of eccentric characters, all transplants from elsewhere, who form an unlikely group at the station. Their loves and longings, their rivalries and entanglements, the stories of their pasts and what brought each of them to the North, form the centre. One summer, on a canoe trip four of them make into the Arctic wilderness (following in the steps of the legendary Englishman John Hornby, who, along with his small party, starved to death in the barrens in 1927), they find the balance of love shifting, much as the balance of power in the North is being changed by the proposed Mackenzie Valley gas pipeline, which threatens to displace Native people from their land. 

 Character and place driven story of a group of people who come together and share an experience.  I loved the descriptions of the Canadian wilderness.

A quiet, contemplative read. 

The Ocean at the End of The Lane by Neil Gaiman

It began for our narrator forty years ago when the family lodger stole their car and committed suicide in it, stirring up ancient powers best left undisturbed. Dark creatures from beyond this world are on the loose, and it will take everything our narrator has just to stay alive: there is primal horror here, and menace unleashed - within his family and from the forces that have gathered to destroy it. 

His only defence is three women, on a farm at the end of the lane. The youngest of them claims that her duckpond is an ocean. The oldest can remember the Big Bang.

Part fantasy, part horror and part coming-of-age tale, this bewitching story is a beautifully written adult fairytale.