BOOKS ON SALE - 20% OFF!

Mockingbird is offering 20% off all new titles in stock!  

Take advantage of this opportunity to drop in for a browse and a bargain.  We have old and modern classic adult fiction and nonfiction and an exquisite collection of children's books.  Pick up hard-to-find books by U.S. Caldecott winners Leo Lionni, Tomie dePaola, Kevin Henkes, Dav Pilkey, William Stieg, Maurice Sendak, Mo Willems, David Shannon, Robert McCloskey, Virginia Lee Burton, Dr. Suess, Molly Bang, Chris Van Allsburg, David Wiesner, Simms Tabak, Margaret Wise Brown and many more.  These classics can be found along side your Australian and UK favourites!

This sale does not apply to our collectible books such first editions or signed copies.  It also does not apply to special orders.

Calling all Book Lovers: Mockingbird Book Shop is for Sale

Do you love books?  Have you ever dreamed of owning a charming neighbourhood bookshop?  Well, this may be the opportunity you've been waiting for. 

Evelyn Snow, the owner of Mockingbird Book Shop, is returning to the United States with her family in July 2008.  Evelyn hates to leave as she has fallen in love with Melbourne and the little bookshop she created less than two years ago.  Now she is looking for a dedicated and capable individual to purchase her business so it will continue into the future. 

Mockingbird Book Shop is an important part of Mont Albert Village and Evelyn can't imagine owning a small business in a nicer location.  This lovely village just off of Mont Albert Road is home to many high quality independent businesses.  Traders and customers alike would hate to see this beloved bookshop disappear.  Evelyn's decided to keep the name and the website, but she's selling the stock, the shelving and the equipment. 

If you have the desire, the skills, the imagination and the resources to run a small business and would like more information about Mockingbird Book Shop, please contact Evelyn at mockingbird@bigpond.com.

Pulitzer Prize for Fiction 2008 - The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao by Junot Diaz

I thoroughly enjoyed reading this book.  I'm tempted to say it's one of the most original books I've read, but it reminds me too much of The Confederacy of Dunces, one of my favourite novels.  Oscar is as unlucky as Ignatius, but he's a science fiction nerd in search of love.  Have you ever heard of the dreaded fuku affecting inhabitants of the Dominican Republic?  Well I hadn't, but now I'm a believer.  Disastrous bad luck has plagued several generations of Oscar's family and there are no signs of it ending any time soon.  In spite of it all, the book is very funny.  The story is finely crafted, with Junot taking the reader from the Dominican Republic to the US and back.  It's one of the few books I look forward to reading a second time, but the next time I'll have a Spanish dictionary on hand.  

The Man Booker Prize for Fiction 2007 - The Gathering by Anne Enright

This literary prize was originally funded by Booker McConnell, a multinational corpoaration, but when The Man Group became the sponsor of The Booker Prize Foundation in 2002 the name was changed to The Man Booker Prize for Fiction.  The prize has been awarded annually since 1969 for the best full length novel by a citizen of the British Commonwealth or the Republic of Ireland.  For more information about The Man Booker Prize for Fiction, visit www.themanbookerprize.com.

Just announced 16 October, the 2007 winner is Anne Enright's The Gathering.  This novel, Irishwoman Enright's fourth, traces sexual hurt and redemption through three generations, showing how memories warp and family secrets fester.  The book's narrator, Veronica Hegarty, traces her family history after her brother, Liam, commits suicide by walking into the sea, hoping to make sense of his death.

"When people pick up a book they may want something happy that will cheer them up," Enright said.  "In that case, they shouldn't really pick up my book. ... it is the intellectual equivalent of a Hollywood weepie."  She later told the BBC, "Why go to sad films? Why read a sad book? ... It releases something, or enables something."

Literary Excellence in Australian Books for Children Recognised

In conjunction with Book Week 2007, the Children's Book Council of Australia honoured the following books and their authors:

• Picture Book of the Year - Shaun Tan's The Arrival  (Lothian Books)  (Honour Books:  Sally Rippin and David Metzenthen's (text) The Rainbirds (Lothian Books); Anne Spudvilas and Margaret Wild's (text) Woolves in the Sitee (Penguin/Viking))
• Older Readers Book of the Year - Margo Lanagan's Red Spikes (Allen & Unwin)  (Honour Books:  D.M. Cornish's Monster Blood Tatoo:  Book One (Omnibus, Scholastic); Ursula Dubosarsky's The Red Shoe (Allen & Unwin))
• Younger Readers Book of the Year - Catherine Bateson's Being Bee (Univ. of Queensland Press)  (Honour Books:  Pat Flynn and Tom Jellett's (illustrations) Tuckstop Kid (Univ. of Queensland Press); Sophie Laguna's Bird & Sugar Boy (Penguin Books)) 
• Early Childhood Book of the Year - Libby Gleeson and Freya Blackwood's (illustrations) Amy & Louis (Scholastic Press)  (Honour Books:  Meredith Costain and Pamela Allen's (illustrations) Doodledum Dancing (Penguin/Viking); Margaret Wild and Deborah Niland's (illustrations) Chatterbox (Penguin/Viking))
• Eve Pownall Award for Information Books - Mark Norman's The Penguin Book: Birds in Suits (black dog books)  (Honour Books:  Leon Davidson's Red Haze: Australians & New Zealanders in Vietnam (black dog books) and Corinne Fenton and Peter Gouldthorpe's (illustrations) Queenie: One Elephant's Story (black dog books))
• Crichton Award for Children's Book Illustration - Vincent Agostino for When Elephants Lived in the Sea (Lothian Books, text by Jane Godwin) 

Miles Franklin Literary Award Winner for 2007 - Carpentaria by Alexis Wright

The Miles Franklin Literary Award was created pursuant to a bequest by Stella Maria Sarah Miles Franklin (Miles Franklin), the Australian writer, and it has been awarded annually since 1957 to recognise literary excellence in a "published novel or play portraying Australian life in any of its phases."  For more information about the award and its previous winners, visit www.trust.com.au/Content.aspx?topicID=129.

The 2007 winner is Alexis Wright for Carpentaria.  Alexis Wright is one of Australia’s finest Aboriginal writers.  Carpentaria is her second novel, a soaring epic set in the Gulf country of north-western Queensland, from where her people come.

Pulitzer Prize for Fiction 2007 - The Road by Cormac McCarthy

The Pulitzer Prize was established by Joseph Pulitzer, a Hungarian-born immigrant to the US and the publisher of the New York Globe, through an endowment to Columbia University in New York.  The prize is awarded in a variety of catagories, but the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction has been awarded annually since 1918 for fiction in a book form by an American author and on a topic preferably dealing with American life.  For more information about the Pulitzer Prize visit www.pulitzer.org.      

The Road  by Cormac McCarthy won the 2007 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction.  Cormac McCarthy has written nine previous novels of which the best known is All the Pretty Horses, the first book in The Border Trilogy.  The Road  is the profoundly moving story of a journey. It boldly imagines a future in which no hope remains, but in which a father and his son, “each the other’s world entire,” are sustained by love.