State Bookstore in Hobart, Tasmania | Book shop

State Bookstore

Locality: Hobart, Tasmania

Phone: +61 3 6234 6318

Address: 377 Elizabeth Street 7002 Hobart, TAS, Australia

Website: http://statecinemabookstore.com.au

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• Independent book shop

25.01.2022 It's almost Christmas time and we are fully stocked with gifts! Whether your after jigsaws, art sets, books or hand soap we have something for everyone. These beautiful gifts will make anyone's Christmas merry and bright!

25.01.2022 Trent Dalton's books are always a colourful explosion, and we love the cover of his latest book, All Our Shimmering Skies. The inside of the novel is just as beautiful and is destined to become another classic. --- Darwin, 1942, and as Japanese bombs rain down, motherless Molly Hook, the gravedigger's daughter, turns once again to the sky for guidance. She carries a stone heart inside a duffel bag next to the map that leads to Longcoat Bob, the deep-country sorcerer who put a... curse on her family. By her side are the most unlikely travelling companions: Greta, a razor-tongued actress and Yukio, a fallen Japanese fighter pilot. Run, Molly, run, says the daytime sky. Run to the vine forests. Run to northern Australia's wild and magical monsoon lands. Run to friendship. Run to love. Run. Because the graverobber's coming, Molly, and the night-time sky is coming with him. So run, Molly, run. See more

25.01.2022 Can't decide what to read? Don't know what to get for someone for Christmas? Come in and grab a copy of the Bookseller's Choice Reading Guide and all of your problems will be over. This beautiful little guide contains some wonderful book recommendations, of all genres and types.

24.01.2022 Wanna get out of the house this weekend and enjoy some spring weather? Why not get some inspiration from our selection of local walking guides?

24.01.2022 The film I Am Greta will be opening at the State in October, and there's never been a better time to learn about what's going on in the world. More importantly, listening to the youth is a great way to find out how we can help make a better future for everyone. --- I don’t want you to be hopeful. I want you to panicI want you to act as if our house is on fire. Because it is.... When she was fifteen years old, Greta Thunberg’s teacher explained to her class that our climate is changingthe earth is getting warmer, the polar ice caps are melting, and life on earth is threatened. Greta was devastated. What could she do? If the grown-ups weren’t doing enough to save the planet, Greta would have to demand change herself. So she went on strike, skipping school every Friday to sit outside of the Swedish Parliament building with a sign that read School Strike for Climate. At first, Greta was the only one. But gradually, more and more students joined her, until her lone protest had sparked a worldwide student movement for action on climate change.

23.01.2022 We all remember how popular the book A Long Way Home (and the film LION) by Saroo Brierley was when it came out a few years ago. It told the absolutely heartbreaking story of 5 year old Saroo getting lost on the streets of India, surviving by himself for weeks before being taken in by an orphanage and ultimately getting adopted by a family on the other side of the world. Released this week was a beautiful children's picture book version of the story and another perspective on... it written by Saroo's adoptive mother Sue. Pop in to grab yourself one today. From the Blurb of Lioness: Saroo Brierley’s journey home to a small village in India with the help of Google Earth became an internationally bestselling book and inspired the major motion picture LION. But the story of how his adoptive mother, Sue, came into his life half a world away in Tasmania is every bit as riveting. In this uplifting and deeply personal book Sue reveals for the first time her own traumatic childhood. The daughter of a violent alcoholic whose business gambles left her family destitute, she grew up in geographic and emotional isolation. When Sue married and broke free of her father she was determined to also sever the cycle of despair, and made the selfless decision not to have a biological child. Instead, inspired by a vision she’d had as a young girl, she chose to adopt two children in need Saroo and Mantosh. Little did she imagine that twenty-five years later she would be portrayed on screen by another Australian mother who chose to adopt Nicole Kidman. Moving and inspiring, Lioness explores the myth of motherhood, how families are formed in many ways, and how love and perseverance can bring us together.

22.01.2022 If your house could do with a little bit of a Grecian vibe, but you can't quite afford a 2000 year old urn, then come and grab one of these amazing paper vase covers.

22.01.2022 Need some creative inspiration? The Fire of Joy was the final book Clive James completed before his death in 2019. It takes its title from the French expression Feu de Joie, which refers to a military celebration when all the riflemen of a regiment fire one shot after another in a wave of continuous sound: it is a reminder that the regiment’s collective power relies on the individual, and vice versa. In this book, James has chosen a succession of English poems, exploding in s...equence from Chaucer to the present day; they tell the story of someone writing something wonderful, and someone else coming along, reading it, and feeling impelled to write something even more wonderful. After a lifetime, these are the poems James found so good that he remembered them despite himself. In offering them to you, the main purpose of this book is to provide ammunition that will satisfy your urge to discover, learn and declaim verse. See more

21.01.2022 The fantastic book, Where the Crawdad Sings, has become a worldwide bestseller since it's release, which is exceptional for a debut novel. This moving and, at times, heartbreaking novel is a must read. --- For years, rumors of the Marsh Girl have haunted Barkley Cove, a quiet town on the North Carolina coast. So in late 1969, when handsome Chase Andrews is found dead, the locals immediately suspect Kya Clark, the so-called Marsh Girl. But Kya is not what they say. Sensitive... and intelligent, she has survived for years alone in the marsh that she calls home, finding friends in the gulls and lessons in the sand. Then the time comes when she yearns to be touched and loved. When two young men from town become intrigued by her wild beauty, Kya opens herself to a new lifeuntil the unthinkable happens. Perfect for fans of Barbara Kingsolver and Karen Russell, Where the Crawdads Sing is at once an exquisite ode to the natural world, a heartbreaking coming-of-age story, and a surprising tale of possible murder. Owens reminds us that we are forever shaped by the children we once were, and that we are all subject to the beautiful and violent secrets that nature keeps.

21.01.2022 Ahead of the release of the Secret Garden on the big screen next week, we have a wonderful collection of exciting and mystical stories (including The Secret Garden of course) available in our bookstore now.

19.01.2022 It's a lovely day outside, and in Tasmania there's always a beautiful place to take a walk not too far away. This book will help you find the best places to experience as we head into spring.

18.01.2022 The bright and garish cover of the Man Booker Prize winning 'Meanwhile In Dopamine City' is a perfect cover for the darkness within. DBC Pierre's darkly comic book looks at our relationship with technology, through the eyes of a father trying to protect his daughter. Timely and prescient, this is a must read. ---... Dopamine City is the story of Lonny Cush, sanitation worker and single parent, kind-hearted and red-blooded, who is trying his best to protect his kids from the hysterical hyper-reality of 21st century life. He lives in an unnamed fictional world city, dominated by a huge tech company akin to Google. A manual worker - although he has been put forward for 'retraining', a euphemism for redundancy - Lonny is out of sync with the changes in his hometown and his century, and doesn't have the means to give his quiet teenage son Egan and his precocious, ultra-demanding nine-year-old daughter Shelby (one of the most memorably awful children in literature!) what they need, or say they need. But with his mother-in-law circling for custody, and needing to win back his kids' favour after he maybe went too far in discipling Shelby, he succumbs, splashing out on the thing Shelby wants more than anything else: her first smartphone. And so begins the silken silence as she drifts off to her room and down the rabbit hole of memes, trolls, hysteria and peer-pressure, and the true, vertiginous terrors of 21st-century life start flooding into the Cush household. And what should Lonny do? Rescue her or follow her? Because who is right: Lonny, or the world he and everybody else is living in now?

17.01.2022 Come and grab these amazing Vegan recipe books before they are Ve-gone!

17.01.2022 Our crib bedding is beautifully soft and in wonderful designs and colours. Best of all, they are 100% organic bamboo so not only are they good for your baby, they're good for the environment.

17.01.2022 The beautiful book Petal is available now in our bookstore, and it's a lushly illustrated celebration of nature's most beautiful work, the flower. From roadside daisies to exotic hothouse lilies, botanical illustrator Adriana Picker has curated specimens from all over the world to create this illustrated compendium of floral wonder. Petal is arranged into various flower families, with illustrations of close-ups, cross-sections, buds and foliage revealing the flowers' unique characteristics, colors and sculptural beauty. Adriana draws on her lifelong obsession for flowers and plants to detail the traditions, folklore, fame, scent and meaning behind our favorite blooms, along with some lesser-known oddities. This is the book of botanical illustration for a new generation of flower lovers.

16.01.2022 We hope that there are only good things on the horizon for Hobart, but Dennis Glover's book imagines a near future where our city is in bad shape. An adventurous experiment might just be what Hobart needs to get back on it's feet. Drawing comparisons with Brave New World and 1984, this dystopian novel is timely, concerning but ultimately hopeful. ---... Hobart, 2022: a city with declining population, in the grip of a dark recession. A rusty ship sails into the harbour and begins to unload its cargo on the site of the once famous but now abandoned Gallery of Future Art, known to the world as GoFA. One day the city’s residents are awoken by a high-pitched sound no one has heard for two generations a factory whistle. GoFA’s owner, world-famous tycoon Dundas Faussett, is creating his most ambitious installation yet. He’s going to defeat the internet’s dominance over our lives by establishing a new Year Zero: 1948. Those whose jobs and lives have been destroyed by Amazon and Uber and Airbnb are invited to fight back in the only way that can possibly succeed: by living as if the internet and the smartphone had never been invented.

16.01.2022 The return of a legend! Celebrating forty years of inspiring wonderful creations and creating happy memories, the Woman's Weekly Birthday Cake Book is back in stock here at the State.

16.01.2022 We have a fantastic selection of high-quality charity Christmas cards now available in the bookstore. All proceeds go to supporting excellent charities such as the Breast Cancer Research Foundation and the RSPCA.

15.01.2022 One of the most beautiful creatures in nature, butterflies are the perfect subject for a stunning book. --- In this fascinating book from the New York Times bestselling author of The Horse, Wendy Williams explores the lives of one of the world’s most resilient creaturesthe butterflyshedding light on the role that they play in our ecosystem and in our human lives.

15.01.2022 We have a bunch of amazing new books, and some Tasmanian bestsellers, back in stock. Come on in and grab your new favourite read.

14.01.2022 Much requested here at the bookstore, we have some new copies of the John Cook memoir, The Last Lighthouse Keeper. A Tasmanian tale that is beautifully told. --- In Tasmania, John Cook is known as 'The Keeper of the Flame'. As one of Australia's longest-serving lighthouse keepers, John spent 26 years tending Tasmania's well-known kerosene 'lights' at Tasman Island, Bruny Island, Eddystone Point and Maatsuyker Island.... From sleepless nights keeping the lights alive, battling the wind and sea as they ripped at gutters and flooded stores, raising a joey, tending sheep and keeping ducks and chickens, the life of a keeper was one of unexpected joy and heartbreak. But for John, nothing was more heartbreaking than the introduction of electric lights, and the lighthouses that were left empty forever. Evocatively told, The Last Lighthouse Keeper is a love story between a man and a dying way of life, as well as a celebration of wilderness and solitude.

12.01.2022 Kyle Perry has been in and signed copies of his wonderful book, The Bluffs. Head on in and grab them before they all disappear. --- At the bottom of the world, there is an island. It is a land of rugged wilderness, of ice and snow and blistering heat They say extinct tigers still roam there. They say other things roam, too.... When a school group of teenage girls go missing in the remote wilderness of Tasmania’s Great Western Tiers, the people of Limestone Creek are immediately on alert. Not long ago, six young girls went missing in the area of those dangerous bluffs, and the legends of ‘the Hungry Man’ still haunt locals to this day. Now, authorities can determine that the teacher, Eliza Ellis, was knocked unconscious, so someone on the mountain was up to foul play. Jordan Murphy, father of missing student Jasmine and the town’s local dealer, instantly becomes prime suspect, but Detective Con Badenhorst knows that in a town this size with corrupt cops, small-town politics, and a teenage YouTube sensation anyone could be hiding something, and bluffing comes second nature.

12.01.2022 Father's Day is coming up, and we've got some wonderful books for all those dads out there!

11.01.2022 For the uninitiated the Booker Prize is an award for the best English language novel of the year, and any book to even make it onto the shortlist is a must read. Right now we have a collection of winners and shortlisted books for you to get your hands on; guaranteed to be a worthwhile read.

11.01.2022 Former US President, Barack Obama, has released his long awaited memoir chronicling his early life and the first part of his presidency. Originally envisioned as a single book, this is volume one of his memoirs, and it is a very detailed deep dive into the life of a President. It is about the closest you can come to sitting in the Oval Office. ---... In the stirring, highly anticipated first volume of his presidential memoirs, Barack Obama tells the story of his improbable odyssey from young man searching for his identity to leader of the free world, describing in strikingly personal detail both his political education and the landmark moments of the first term of his historic presidencya time of dramatic transformation and turmoil. Obama takes readers on a compelling journey from his earliest political aspirations to the pivotal Iowa caucus victory that demonstrated the power of grassroots activism to the watershed night of November 4, 2008, when he was elected 44th president of the United States, becoming the first African American to hold the nation’s highest office.

11.01.2022 From the winner of the Ampersand Prize comes this smart, swoony LGBTQ YA novel about a teenage band on the way to the top. With shades of hit TV series Nashville and the band drama of Fleetwood Mac, this brilliant debut is perfect for music lovers everywhere. --- Liliana’s hitting all the wrong notes. She’s a sixteen-year-old exchange student with a secret crush on Carter, her new band’s smoking hot guitarist but she’s also got a girlfriend back home.... So when she writes a song about him and it lands the band a record deal, she quickly realises she’s in hot water. Soon, Liliana will have to choose between an alluring boy and the girl she left behind, between love and lust, and between the fame that beckons and staying true to the music that’s in her heart.

11.01.2022 Spring has sprung at the bookstore! Hop on in and grab a great Spring read!

11.01.2022 There's an explosion of colour in the bookstore this week. We have some new Lamy pens which look as beautiful as they write. These are an excellent gift for Father's Day or any writer in your life who fancies an upgrade of their pencil case.

08.01.2022 Available now at the State Bookstore, Richard Flanningan's outstanding new novel The Living Sea of Waking Dreams. In a world of perennial fire and growing extinctions, Anna’s aged mother is dyingif her three children would just allow it. Condemned by their pity to living she increasingly escapes through her hospital window into visions of horror and delight. When Anna’s finger vanishes and a few months later her knee disappears, Anna too feels the pull of the window. She begins to see that all around her others are similarly vanishing, but no one else notices. All Anna can do is keep her mother alive. But the window keeps opening wider, taking Anna and the reader ever deeper into a strangely beautiful novel about hope and love and orange-bellied parrots.

08.01.2022 We've been holding our breath for this one! Richard Flanagan's new novel THE LIVING SEA OF WAKING DREAMS is finally gracing our shelves (and windows and counters and display cases and...)

07.01.2022 Found the perfect gift? Here at the State Bookstore we can wrap that book you've found, and make the recipient feel extra special when they see the delightful delivery.

06.01.2022 From the author of A Man Called Ove comes a new book, highly recommended by us here at the State, about the secrets and anxities every one carries around with them. A poignant, charming novel about a crime that never took place, a would-be bank robber who disappears into thin air, and eight extremely anxious strangers who find they have more in common than they ever imagined ---... Looking at real estate isn't usually a life-or-death situation, but an apartment open house becomes just that when a failed bank robber bursts in and takes a group of strangers hostage. The captives include a recently retired couple who relentlessly hunt down fixer-uppers to avoid the painful truth that they can't fix up their own marriage. There's a wealthy banker who has been too busy making money to care about anyone else and a young couple who are about to have their first child but can't seem to agree on anything, from where they want to live to how they met in the first place. Add to the mix an eighty-seven-year-old woman who has lived long enough not to be afraid of someone waving a gun in her face, a flustered but still-ready-to-make-a-deal real estate agent, and a mystery man who has locked himself in the apartment's only bathroom, and you've got the worst group of hostages in the world. Each of them carries a lifetime of grievances, hurts, secrets, and passions that are ready to boil over. None of them is entirely who they appear to be. And all of themthe bank robber includeddesperately crave some sort of rescue. As the authorities and the media surround the premises, these reluctant allies will reveal surprising truths about themselves and set in a motion a chain of events so unexpected that even they can hardly explain what happens next. Humorous, compassionate, and wise, Anxious People is an ingeniously constructed story about the enduring power of friendship, forgiveness, and hopethe things that save us, even in the most anxious of times.

04.01.2022 Tomorrow is Father's Day and if you're looking for the perfect gift for Dad then come on in and see what we have on offer.

04.01.2022 From the acclaimed author of The Whisper Man, comes a new thriller in the shape of The Shadow Friend. An exciting, moving and brilliantly creepy book, this one is sure to keep you up at night. --- Twenty-five years ago, troubled teenager Charlie Crabtree committed a shocking and unprovoked murder.... On the darkest corners of the internet, plenty of people still remember what happened: Charlie's crime has attracted a dark infamy. Paul Adams can remember the case too - Charlie and his victim were his friends. Paul left town as soon as he could, and he's never gone back. But then his mother, old and senile, takes a turn for the worse. Though every inch of him resists, it's time to come home. It's not long before things start to go wrong. In the news, Paul learns another copycat has struck. His mother is distressed, insistent that there's something in the house. Someone is following him. Which reminds him of the most unsettling thing about that awful day twenty-five years ago. It wasn't just the murder. It was the fact that afterwards, Charlie Crabtree was never seen again...

03.01.2022 The first of our Christmas gift-ware arrived this week! The store is smelling divine thanks to the piles of Italian made soap and our cooking section is overflowing with eco-friendly natural cleaning utensils.

03.01.2022 Don't go Round The Twist when you hear, but we have a collection of stories by Paul Jennings, as well as his autobiography, here at the bookstore.

02.01.2022 The wonderful literary magazine Island is back on our shelves with an amazing collection of stories, poems and writings. Not only an excellent read, but also a chance to support native writers and creators.

01.01.2022 Honeybee is a tender, profoundly moving novel brimming with vivid characters and luminous words. It's about two lives forever changed by a chance encounter -- one offering hope, the other redemption. It's about when to persevere, and when to be merciful, as Sam learns when to let go, and when to hold on --- Late in the night, fourteen-year-old Sam Watson steps onto a quiet overpass, climbs over the rail and looks down at the road far below.... At the other end of the same bridge, an old man, Vic, smokes his last cigarette. The two see each other across the void. A fateful connection is made, and an unlikely friendship blooms. Slowly, we learn what led Sam and Vic to the bridge that night. Bonded by their suffering, each privately commits to the impossible task of saving the other.