The Bedside Bookstack – August 2023

If You’re Happy by Fiona Robertson, University of Queensland Press, 2022

The wonderful Fiona Robertson has created an equally wonderful collection of stories that take you from regional Australia to Morman America. Divorcees, widowers, war vets and comfy couples find themselves questioning the decisions they’ve made or are forced to make as life changes around them. It doesn’t matter if they find themselves in the middle of a natural disaster or daily domestics, there are human instincts which connect us all. Binge read or savour and set aside.

on a bright hillside in paradise by Annette Higgs, Penguin, 2023

This manuscript was the winner of last year’s Penguin Literary Prize and I can see how it was picked. I was completely absorbed by the sense of character and place as we follow five members of the Hatton family who live on Paradise, a farm in settler Tasmania.

There are births, deaths and marriages, but strangers also arrive during this time, evangelist preachers. Their arrival charts changed paths for each of the characters as ‘life in paradise’ begins to mean something different for each character.

Train lord by Oliver Mol, Penguin, 2022

Oliver Mol gets a 10-month migraine which he can’t shake. He can’t read, write or look at screens but he does need work. Typing ‘Sydney’ and ‘no experience’ into Google he puts in an application to work with Sydney trains.

This memoir is one part observation of his time working on the trains (I would’ve guessed about the vomit and poo but I had no idea there were so many snakes to deal with!!) and many parts the honest reconciling of his journey with severe pain, depression, heartbreak and the creative life.

Foster by Claire Keegan, Faber, 2022

Reading Claire Keegan, I enter a quiet place. There is a stillness to her stories, where small things are given time and attention. Foster follows the summer that our narrator is sent to live on a farm with an older couple who are distant relatives of her mother’s.

She comes from a farm with many children, an exhausted mother and a father who likes to gamble. Just like the narrator, I read at first unable to trust that good could happen but the long days of summer and attention and affection can slowly change all of us. Another quiet beauty from Claire Keegan. Read Small Things Like These for some more Claire Keegan.

Eleven Letters to You by Helen Elliott, Text, 2023

This memoir is a beautiful tribute to some of the people who had a profound influence on Helen Elliott’s life and character, whether they realise it or not. Written exactly as the title suggests, it’s 11 letters to neighbours, teachers and mentors. As we learn about them and their backstories, more of her story emerges too.

I liked the originality of revealing the memories of a life this way and growing up in Melbourne in the 50s, it’s a completely different world which is evoked.

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