What’s sitting on the bedside bookstack this month.
The Ministry of Time by Kaliane Bradley, Sceptre, 2024
I just loved this book to bits n pieces and back again. Sooooooo good! It’s the unlikely but somehow perfect mix of literary, sci-fi and romance touching on ethics, race, identity and your place and actions within a system and society. It’s also incredibly clever and funny. I know! That’s a lot to pack in but you’ll want to read it, even if you’re tired!
Hmm, how to offer the premise and do it any justice? Time travel is possible. It’s just that they don’t know a lot about it’s effects on the human body and mind, so people who are going to die in the past are brought to the present for observation. They’re assigned a ‘bridge’. This person will live with them and help them assimilate into the 21st Century – enter our unnamed female narrator and Commander Graham Gore, a Royal Navy Commander from the failed Franklin Arctic Mission.
All Fours by Miranda July, Canongate, 2024
This is like reading popping candy. It weaves here and there, narrating familiar terrain but in a completely unique way. Our narrator is a semi-famous artist in LA. She’s 45 and it’s all starting to happen, the mood swings, the insomnia, anger, despair, a sudden realisation that desire might be running out, or at least her role in it. So, she doubles down on everything and instead of driving from LA to New York like she planned to do, she stops off and holes up at a roadside motel for 2 weeks after paying $20000 to get it decorated. She’s a total original and this one just needs to be read cos none of this is doing it any justice.
The Candy House by Jennifer Egan, Corsair, 2022
You might remember from the September Bookstack how blown away I was by Jennifer Egan’s A Visit From the Goon Squad. Well, she’s at it again, being brilliant and writing another story-cycle using some of the cameo characters from A Visit From the Goon Squad.
She explodes it out into the near future where memories and consciousness can be uploaded and shared. It’s another one that you just need to read, cos my words can’t do justice to all the craft and cleverness she gets up to in this one.
Love, Death & Other Scenes by Nova Weetman, UQP, 2024
Nova Weetman is usually known for her YA novels but this beautiful and generous memoir is about loss and grief in all facets of her life as a partner, parent, child and creative.
Anyone who has nursed a loved one to the end will recognise the sickbed vigils, the last days, the doorstep dinner drop-offs and the strange space of post funeral days.
And then this, “So much of parenting young children is waiting for them to grow. And so much of parenting older children is wishing they hadn’t.” Oof. That one left me reeling. Again and again, she hits on the universal in such an eloquent way.
All You Took From Me by Lisa Kenway, Transit Lounge, 2024
Lisa was my November Books at the Bowlo guest with this, her debut psychological thriller. It was great to talk to her about content and craft getting into memory and consciousness, emotional isolation, atmospheric settings and the writing (and re-writing) process.
Clare Carpenter has just woken up in a hospital bed after a serious car crash which killed her husband. There’s a strange man watching her in the ICU ward but her amnesia means she doesn’t know who he is. Clare is also an anaesthetist and as her journey to recover her memory gets more frantic, she considers what risks she would take to find out what happened.
First Year by Kristina Ross, Allen & Unwin, 2024
This one is an intense but compelling ride travelling alongside 17-year-old Maeve in her first year at a prestigious drama school. It’s all there, the leading lady and rising stars, the student-faculty liaisons and power dynamics, the rivalry, the chemistry, the new family created by proximity and shared experience, the vulnerability of young hungry creatives and the very fine line between breakdown and breakthrough when learning a craft. Some of the questions it brought up were like those I had when I watched Miles Teller in the movie Whiplash. How much pushing is OK before it becomes harmful and more an exercise in power and domination than teaching?
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Nina Cullen 