What’s teetering on the bedside bookstack this June.
Salt and Skin by Eliza Henry-Jones, Ultimo Press, 2022
I need to take a big breath in just thinking about this book. It was all consuming, in the best of ways. Remote island. Wary locals. Myths and stories of selkies and witches. A mother and her children steeped in their own grief and secrets but looking for a fresh start. Wind and water, endless amounts of both, shaping the people and the place.
There’s such vitality in this book. I felt buffeted around and truly exhausted by the end but also elated by human connection, history, family, sisterhood and survival. Read it. Read it now!!
There was still love by Favel Parrett, Hachette, 2019
This is the story of a Czech family, sliced in half by history. Eva and Máňa are identical twins. In 1938, their father only has enough money to buy false papers and get one girl out of the country. So, we start in 1980s Melbourne where Eva now lives with her husband and granddaughter ‘Little Red Fox’ then cross to Prague where Luděk lives with his grandmother, Máňa.
It’s Luděk and Little Red Fox who observe the family in their separate worlds and we loop back in time to London and to Prague in the 60s to give us the past and fill in what children can’t know from living in a perpetual state of the present. This is a beautiful story of family, culture, love and loss.
Romantic Comedy by Curtis Sittenfeld, doubleday, 2023
Well, this was a lot of fun and I demand that someone turn into a movie immediately. Sally Milz is a comedy writer for a long-running late night tv skit show. The pace is fast and the vibe is cynical and platonic. She writes a piece called the Danny Horst effect about the trend of her male co-writers getting together with famous women out of their league. When Noah Brewster, a famous singer, comes on the show, it looks like the rule might not only apply to men. It’s true, Noah is a bit one-dimensional, but this book definitely delivers on its title. Also, incidentally, a fascinating insight into the process of comedy writing, pitching, edits and the making of a weekly tv show.
A little give – the unsung, unseen, undone work of women by Marina Benjamin, Scribe, 2023
This gorgeous book is part memoir, part essay, part feminist meditation on women’s work. She shares the fascinating story of her Iraqi-Jewish émigré parents, how they came to settle in London and how that equalled another sort of settling, of not really being able to stretch and fulfill their potential. Then there is caring for these parents as they age and her experience of child-rearing, menopause and an empty nest. It’s written so beautifully and personally and is full of food for thought about what the philosopher Ivan Illich calls ‘shadow work’.
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Nina Cullen 