Category: books

The Bedside Bookstack – September 2024

What’s sitting on the bedside bookstack this month.

A Visit From the Goon Squad by Jennifer Egan, Corsair, 2010

Is it a novel or a collection of linked short stories? It doesn’t matter. I just loved it. You could feel how much she was enjoying setting limits and making up her own rules – no POV twice, show the passing of time, write a short story in as many different styles as possible. I mean, a short story through Powerpoint slides, that’s just genius!

Bennie Salazar and his assistant Sasha work together at Sow’s Ear record label. Forwards, backwards and to the side, each chapter gives us a little more of their story through friends, lovers, colleagues and family. How did I not know about this?? It’s been out for ages and even won a Pulitzer. Ne’er mind. Crisis averted. I know about it now and have the Candy House, her latest book, ready to go.

The Love That Remains by Susan Francis, Allen & Unwin, 2020

I had an author chat with Susan Francis for the September Books at the Bowlo and it was such a pleasure to read this book again in preparation. Full disclosure, Susan is the first writer friend I made when I moved to Newcastle, so I write this as a friend and reader.

Her beautiful memoir is proof that the story isn’t always the story and truth is certainly stranger than fiction. She starts out looking for her birth parents, moves to Granada with her husband and then discovers a secret from his past. There’s a lot I’m not saying so you can read the book without any spoilers but it was humbling to share this intimate story.

The Axeman’s Carnival by Catherine Chidgey, Europa, 2022

This is the first book I’ve ever read which is narrated by a magpie, Tama. It took me a little bit to get used to but then it seemed just as it should be for a magpie to be charting the toxic marriage of his owner and the random fame their magpie-human relationship has brought to the quiet hill-country farm they live on. Tama’s father always warned him about humans. He wasn’t right about all of them but he certainly has a point.

The Bookshop Woman by Nanako Hanada, brazen, 2024

My mistake was thinking that this was a novel, so I struggled and wanted it to be more than it was. Once I realised it was the author’s own story of meeting strangers and giving them book recommendations, it all changed. Then it became a fascinating insight into the rich and diverse world of Japanese books and literature and its own list of suggested reading essays, novels, manga, haiku and so many short story collections! The only disappointment was seeing all the asterisks next to the list of books, meaning they aren’t available in an English version.

I loved that she recommended Sightseeing by Rattawut Lapcharoensap. I don’t think it was ever published in Australia. I only know about it and have my copy because many moons ago I was an intern at the Berlin International Literature Festival and he was one of the guests. Nice guy. Great book.

Australiana by Yumna Kassab, Ultimo, 2022

Following on from A Visit from the Goon Squad, this is another novel/short story-cycle. When is something a collection of short stories rather than a novel? I guess when there is a continuing narrative. I’m a big fan in any case (another one to check out is Melissa Manning’s Smokehouse).  I love following a character at a point in time, magnifying in on them, then panning back out to follow someone they’ve brushed up against until we put together the bigger picture of a community and its unique characteristics. This is what Yumna Kassab did in her debut The House of Youssef with an urban setting. Australiana comes after she spent 3 years in Tamworth. This feels like a darker collection with heat and drought and desperation driving many of dynamics.

Fathers and Sons by Ivan Turgenev, Penguin Classics, 1986

I’ve got a pile of classics sitting at home. Every time I consider reading one, I think of the tiny font and the curly sentences and I’m already tired. But somehow, I made myself pick up Turgenev and give him a go (I loved his short story in the George Saunders collection A Swim in a Pond in the Rain).

The pleasant surprise is that he’s really easy to read. It didn’t feel like the mental effort of some others, like an assigned task to suffer through. Style wise, it was a real pleasure. However, I ditched it more than half way through because I was getting impatient with the long philosophical conversations about nihilism.

I know, I know, the whole point is the generational divide, in this case also showing the new ideas for a new Russia of the sons against the more stuffy traditional and institutional ideas of the fathers but after a while it just felt like men shouting at me and by page 189, I just wanted some peace and quiet.

A Court of Mist and Fury by Sarah J Maas, Bloomsbury, 2016

Yep, I’m back in the ‘Court of…’ spicy romantasy franchise. I’ve heard things taper off in the next few books, so I might leave it here but what I appreciated was that the deeds Feyre committed in the previous book and her transformation from mortal to immortal have left her with some pretty severe PTSD and rather than move on neatly to the next thing, a good portion of this book is a slow recovery from that trauma…..albeit aided by a new love interest.

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The bedside bookstack – August 2024

What’s sitting on the bedside bookstack this month.

Loved & Missed by Susie Boyt, Virago, 2021

Ruth’s daughter Eleanor is an addict. Their absence of a relationship and Ruth’s inability to change it shape her days. But then Eleanor has a baby, Lily, and Ruth gets a second chance to be a mother.

This is a beautiful book. She gets to the essence of it all, life’s beginnings and endings and the muddle that comes in between. She also has the knack for humour when you thought there couldn’t be any and her side-kick best friend is so vivid and possibly my favourite character. It came out in 2021 but seems to be everywhere at the moment. Not sure if it’s because delayed publication in Australia or just a zeitgeist thing.

Walk the Blue Fields by Claire Keegan, Faber & Faber, 2007

This was an interesting read. It was definitely Claire Keegan in style but these stories were written before the novels she is so well known for now (Small Things Like These and Foster) and you can see how she has grown as a writer since then. The quiet way of telling a story with space around it is already there as are her observations of Irish life on a local level that speak of bigger cultural themes and there are still sentences that need to be reread or written down just for the truth and beauty in them:

“There’s pleasure to be had in history. What’s recent is another matter and painful to recall.”

And at a wedding, “Any time promise are made in public, people cry..”

The Seven Skins of Esther Wilding by Holly Ringland, Fourth Estate, 2022

Esther Wilding is trying to out run the grief of losing her sister Aura but Tasmania is a small island and she’s got to go home some time. When her mother presents her with Aura’s diary, there are questions that can only be answered by going to Denmark and finding out what happened in the three years Aura lived there.  

Nature and the elements play a starring role in this as well as female relationships and emotional matrilineal inheritance. It made me want to hug my sister and swim in saltwater.

This tale is built around the idea of myths and story, from Denmark and the Faroe Islands in particular, just a note if you don’t fancy fairy tales and origin stories.

A Court of Thorns and Roses by Sarah J Maas, Bloomsbury, 2015

This is my first foray into spicy romantasy territory and I get the hype. In fact, I finished the book and looked up the rest of the series. Too bad there are another four books, my TBR list is already way too long.

Feyre Archeron is human and has grown up hearing about the fae wars and brutality. The lands of Prythian are strictly forbidden and a one-way ticket for her kind. When she kills a shapeshifter wolf his fae kin, Tamlin, comes to collect her according to an old treaty.

Tamlin is high fae and has a court which is facing its own internal threats. You might spy the enemies(captor)-to-lovers trope which works just as well with magic as it does in any contemporary romcom.  

Love Objects by Emily Maguire, Allen & Unwin, 2021

Lena’s Aunty Nic is her favourite person in the world. She’s the reason Lena feels safe enough to move back to Sydney and go to uni which is way out of her comfort zone. It’s a complete surprise when she discovers Aunty Nic has had an accident, is a hoarder and can’t go home until her place is deemed safe enough. As she is trying to clean things up in wanders her brother who hasn’t been seen much since a prison stint after their dad died.

There’s a lot going on here, multigenerational trauma and grief, sex tapes, sibling rifts and a lot of clutter. But there’s also a family in crisis that looks to their past so they can fix the present.

Fifty-two Stories by Anton Chekhov, Penguin, 2020

It’s Chekhov, right? He’s always going to do what he always does – present something seemingly simple which then adds up to way more than the sum of its parts, so that you’re left asking how exactly he pulled it off.

This is one I love to pick up and put down, a few stories at a time so they can marinate. It’s permanently on my bedside table, like actually up there on the sacred space and not on the dusty floor pile. I know.

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The bedside bookstack – July 2024

What’s sitting on the bedside bookstack this month.

The Prophet Song by Paul Lynch, One World, 2023

I’m completely spent after finishing this terrifying read. Things that happen in ‘other’ places like emergency law, surveillance, disappearances of loved ones, unlawful detention and state brutality are suddenly happening in Ireland, to a normal family.

Eilish is a working mother of four. She has two teenagers, a tween and a baby. One day her husband is taken into custody and kept as a prisoner. A few weeks later her oldest child is ordered to leave school and attend compulsory military service.

There are mass protests and arrests. It’s unclear who can be trusted and what survival looks like under this new regime. I was quite paranoid and sick reading this and often furious at Eilish for her actions but what would any of us do put into that situation?

It’s a good reminder of why art is important and not to take what we have for granted. 

The Miller Women by Kelli Hawkins, Harper Collins, 2024

Three generations of women drive the narration of Kelli Hawkins’ new psychological suspense. Joyce, Nicola and Abby Miller all have secrets. When one of Abby’s schoolfriends goes missing, her mother Nicola, worries more that Abby might have something to do with it because the Miller women are capable of darker deeds than their gardening and baking lead you to believe. 

I was lucky enough to talk to Kelli at our July Books at the Bowlo about some of the inspiration behind this story and her process. It’s hard to such much without straying into spoiler territory but it has great female dynamics and questions of family and inheritance at its core.

Mrs Hopkins by Shirley Barrett, Allen & Unwin, 2024

Two years ago, I gifted myself Invocations #3, an art work by Helen Brancatisano when my brilliant cousin, artist Miriam Cullen, held an exhibition with her. It’s three girls in a tree and some abstract cockatoos in the sky. It looks like such a moment of joy and freedom and seemed like a good reminder to play and stop taking everything so seriously.

Then Helen told me that it was part of a series she did based on Cockatoo Island where girls had been locked up for being poor and homeless. The girls rioted about their conditions and the picture was actually them trying to get the attention of a busy working harbour. I liked it even more, now it was also about pluck, freedom and courage.

So, I was thrilled when I found out that Shirley Barrett’s final book was about the Bileola School for girls on Cockatoo Island, the girls who live there and Mrs Hopkins the new school mistress. I ripped through this horrified by colonial NSW and the powers that be but fascinated by the story of those on the island.

The Vaster Wilds by Lauren Groff, Hutchinson Heineman, 2023

This book is a love letter to nature and the resilience of the human spirit. A young girl is running, escaping a plague-ridden frontier town in 1600s America. Her hunger and fear keep her moving ever onwards through the unfamiliar wild country. It’s winter but she is clever and resourceful and after so much time in the natural world, she becomes part of it.

This is written almost like a fairy story, not the Disney kind but one of the older M-rated ones. It’s visceral and dark with danger all around and no guarantee of a happy ending.

Magnolia Parks by Jessa Hastings, Orion, 2021

Magnolia Parks is part of London’s It scene. She’s gorgeous and rich and so are all her friends, particularly BJ Ballentine. BJ and Magnolia are made for each other and were together for years. But then he broke her heart. Now ‘it’s complicated’ and they spend a lot of time doing what people who love/hate each other do.

If only toxic relationships didn’t make for such addictive reading, cos really most of the characters are repulsive and treating each other badly and every cliché of rich and entitled you could imagine…and yet I kept turning those pages like I press ‘next episode’ on a streaming series.

Confessions of a Bookseller by Shaun Bythell, Profile Books, 2019

As a reader and a writer, book shops are one of those cherished places. Secondhand bookshops maybe even more for the serendipity factor. You can’t know what you’re going in for because you can’t know what you’re going to find.

I like these bookseller books that diarise their days. Each one has it’s own feel depending on where it is. Shaun Bythells’ bookshop is in Wigtown, Scotland. It’s frequented by locals and tourists and from his anecdotes it’s clear that ‘there’s naught as queer as folk’.

His buying trips were also a good read. He spends a lot of time driving out to remote castles and manors houses looking through their libraries, uncovering originals and rarities. For someone in Australia, it’s crazy how calm he is about having books from the 16th Century on the shelves!!

I did a little search and was happy to see that his bookshop is still open. He survived COVID and thus far the Amazon encroachment of all things retail. Wigtown is also home to The Open Book, an airbnb you can rent if you want to run a book shop for a week – apparently booked out for the next 3 years. Who knew?

Cool Water by Myfanwy Jones, Hachette, 2024

The Tinaroo Dam is a piece of history for the Herbert family. Victor Herbert was the butcher for the temporary town that serviced the workers. His son, Joe Herbert, used to take the family there and now his son, Frank Herbert is there for his daughter’s wedding.

But history isn’t water under a bridge (or low in a dam) and each of the Herbert men lives with ghost of the previous generation.

Set in the 1950s and now, this is the gnarly landscape of family dynamics and all that’s been left unsaid for too long. Oh humans!

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The bedside bookstack – June 2024

What’s sitting on the bedside bookstack this month.

In the Middle of the Fields by Mary Lavin, New Island, 2016

Mary Lavin is known as one of Ireland’s best short story writers. Colm Toibin writes a beautiful introduction in this edition, about how she doesn’t fetishise Ireland for foreign readers (many of her stories appeared in the New Yorker). She writes more about people’s dynamics and inner life than politics or culture. Her Irish women especially, are more than the stereotype of widow, tired mother or spinster. She’s so evocative, conjuring isolation or grief or joy in a few simple sentences and then keeping it there while she moves the story ever onward.

I’m dipping in and out of this collection, having decided that gorging on an anthology like I often do is theft to the individual stories. Consuming them one after the other doesn’t let me savour them or reflect.

The Raptures by Jan Carson, Penguin, 2022

It’s early nineties Northern Ireland and the Troubles are in full swing. Every night on the telly there are stories about bombs and fighting. In the small town of Ballylack a primary school child gets sick and dies. Then another one. And another. These are Hannah’s classmates. Her family aren’t Catholic or Church of England. They’re Evangelical, so she was already an outsider before the dead kids started talking to her.

There’s communities, conflict, faith and magic realism in this book, which sound like much more of an awkward mix than they turn out to be on the page.

An American Marriage by Tayari Jones, Vintage Books 2018

Celestial and Roy have only been married 18 months when he’s accused of a crime he didn’t commit and sentenced to 12 years in prison. They remain married on paper but by the time he’s released early, they haven’t spoken in two years.

This is a big one. Like a Tolstoy tableau, one marriage plays out as a reflection of modern America with race, incarceration, inherited trauma and questions of loyalty and ownership at its heart.

Open Water by Caleb Azumah Nelson, Viking, 2021

In a South London pub a man and woman meet. Something starts between them, a connection that dodges definition. They’re both creatives, both scholarship kids who tried to fit in with their white peers, both sick of their friends matching the appearance of someone police are looking for.

This reads like stream of consciousness, a rhythmic parallel to the soundtrack of our narrator. It’s a very cerebral read and I picked it up with a flu fogged head and gave it a good go. I stayed the course for more than 100 pages but then abandoned ship. Not for me for right now.

The Grazier’s Son by Cathryn Hein, Harlequin, 2024

As mentioned, it’s been a bit of month, so it was nice that this month’s Books at the Bowlo author was rural romance writer Cathryn Hein. After hearing her talk about daydreaming along country roads, hero helicopter pilots and vintage fashion, I thought this might be just what I needed. Joining Stirling and Darcy on their bumpy road to happiness via embezzlement, infidelity, injuries and a surprise inheritance from an estranged father was just what I needed amidst my sneezing and sniffles.

The Sympathizer by Viet Thanh Nguyen, Grove Press, 2015

A communist sleeper agent narrates this story during occupied Vietnam and in America after the fall of Saigon. I haven’t finished it yet but it’s right down there in the details. His voice is so distinct, incredibly dry yet conflicted about the compromises that are made and the moral questions of what he does. The bloody mess of war is not some aerial shot in this book. It’s right up close. The body count keeps climbing but unlike the faceless and expendable lives in an action movie, these people have names and families and lives they were living.

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The bedside bookstack – May2024

What’s sitting on the bedside bookstack this month.

It’s more a small collection than bookstack this month. I need to get onto research for my manuscript and had to put a ban on novels because I just wasn’t getting the research reading done. But one cannot live on obligatory reading alone, so there are also some essays and interviews I’m including.

Beside Myself – An Actor’s Life by Antony Sher, Nick Hern Books, 2001

The main character in my manuscript is an actor, thus the multiple actor autobiographies I’m reading. This one has a lot about Sher’s early life in South Africa, his family dynamics and their formative nature. He had a distant father who never seemed to understand who he was and a mother who always championed him and believed he was destined for greatness.

I’m always curious about people’s emotional excavations into who they are and how they got to be that way but for my purposes, the real gold was in his detail about productions. It’s fascinating the fragile ecosystem that exists within this web of people brought together so intensely for a period of time. I also loved reading about the emotional preparation for his roles, how some of them fit and others never quite worked.

A lot of his work was with the Royal Shakespeare Company, so it was also a refresher on plays I hadn’t read in decades and an insight into others which I’d never read or seen staged.

Shakespeare – The Man who Pays the Rent by Judi Dench, Michael Joseph, 2023

Continuing on with Shakespeare is Judi Dench’s book which is an extended and ongoing interview with actor and director Brendan O’Hea. If Shakespeare doesn’t interest you, then move on because the title gives it away.

This is two people who know and love their stuff asking all the right questions and giving the answers that you can after a professional acting life that has spanned decades. Again, the detail and deconstruction that is needed by the actor when playing a character is incredible to read about and gives me a much deeper understanding of the texts.

Dear Life by Alice Munro, Vintage, 2012

Alice Munro died this month and so in honour of one of the greatest modern short story writers, I had to pull a collection out in memoriam. What is there to say? She’s measured and quiet in tone but there’s nothing empty about her stories. There is always much more going on under the surface and she’s a great witness to life’s contradictions and unpredictability. After this reminder, it’s time to go back to some of her earlier collections which I haven’t read yet.

Paris Review articles on Alice Munro

The Paris Review is famous for its interview series with writers The Art of Fiction. These are extended interviews written out in complete question and answer format. For a limited time the Alice Munro – Art of Fiction 137 interview is available for all to read.

The Paris Review also wrote an obituary for her What a Goddam Writer She Was as well as an essay Inside Alice Munro’s Notebooks.

Jenny Erpenbeck on the Death of her Mother, Granta

I’ve also been thinking about Jenny Erpenbeck’s personal essay in Granta Open Book-keeping ever since I read it.

She writes about her mother’s death and then in detached but loaded detail continues with the bureaucracy you need to deal with after someone dies. It’s a lot of work to finalise someone’s life and though the person isn’t left, their ‘things’ still are.

This resonated with me because my mum has recently gone into residential aged care and I’m going up and down between Newcastle and Sydney slowly clearing her place out with my brother and sister. There’s a lot to discover about a person you only knew as a parent and plenty of decisions about ‘things’ and ‘stuff’, what matters and means something and does that then mean you have to keep it.

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The bedside bookstack – April 2024

What’s sitting on the bedside bookstack this month.

Aphrodite’s Breath by Susan Johnson, Allen & Unwin 2023

Susan Johnson and her mother pack up their lives in Brisbane and move to the Greek Island of Kythera together.

This book is alive with the sensual delights of life – eating, drinking, swimming, dancing and romancing. It’s also a contemplation of self, family dynamics, ‘home’, the writer’s life, how to live a good life and of course the Greek Island Kythera which is as much as main character as Susan and her mother Barbara.

The island with its seasons, history, culture and unique landscape is so vividly conjured and all the while there is the evolution and examination of her relationship with her mother. How can we be adult parents and still find ourselves almost back at the beginning with our own parents? There is so much love in this relationship but she’s honest enough to write in the frustrations and distances which also shape their time together on Kythera. Such a beautiful  and rich book. I’m still thinking about it.

The Hand That First Held Mine by Maggie O’Farrell, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2010

This book runs as two parallel narratives of Lexie moving through Soho and the London art world in the 60s and Elina and Ted both finding their way in the aftermath of the traumatic birth of their first child. The impatient reader in me wanted to join the dots sooner than the story allowed.

Maggie has written plenty of dual and multi narrative novels but I think my impatience was that each narrative was smaller than hers usually are, couples with a few people clustered around them. I think what I really missed were her vast and fascinating family dynamics. For me, that’s when she is the absolute master, writing about families.

All the Unloved by Susan McCreery, Spineless Wonders, 2023

Thank you, Spineless Wonders for championing short form fiction! I’m a huge fan of short stories and novellas but I know that they’re a notoriously hard sell for publishers and most of the big houses avoid them. Thus, go you good thing Susan, to have a stand-alone novella out in the world!

Jade lives in block of flats with her mum in 90s Bondi. She’s awkward and adolescent and doesn’t need everything else around her to be changing too but it is. Her step-dad moves out. So does one of the women from the couple upstairs. An interesting but introverted tenant moves in downstairs and then there’s her mum’s client Rebecca, who everyone seems just a little in love with.

Darling by India Knight, Penguin 2022

This was soooo much fun!! Nancy Mitford fans, not sure how purist you are but if you’re open to a modern retelling of The Pursuit of Love, then pick this one up. Everyone else, you’re fine because you won’t be holding it up against anything else.

Darling is about lovely eccentric rich people in the English countryside and eventually London and beyond as well as truly awful rich people but everyone, even the cringey cameos are just so vivid and enjoyable. The Radlet family especially move on at a merry clip with their own vernacular and idiosyncrasies and it’s just such a pleasure to join them.

Slaughterhouse Five by Kurt Vonnegut, Vintage Classic, 2000

It’s tricky for a book that comes to you loaded with its own success and place in the canon. I thought it was time I read some Vonnegut and I have now. I didn’t love and didn’t hate it. He’s definitely doing some interesting things with non-linear plotlines, which would’ve been even more original at the time of its original publication in 1969.

The narrator, who says he’s the author, wants to write about the fire-bombing of Dresden during the second world war but he can’t seem to get into it for himself. So, he writes about Billy Pilgrim instead who is being held as a POW but is simultaneously flashing forwards and backwards in life to another planet as well as old age. I know, I know, it’s metaphor and satire and a very specific comment on the atrocity of war. Just not what I was expecting it  to be.

Strange Sally Diamond by Liz Nugent, Sandycove, 2023

This thriller comes with plenty of accolades and No 1 spots. It’s pacy, original and a good read. Sally Diamond has problems with empathy and connection. Since her mum died, she’s lived an isolated life with her father on the outskirts of a small Irish town. He tells her that when he dies, she should put him out with the rubbish, so when he dies, that’s what she does. The police get involved and it hits the headlines because Sally Diamond is not who she thinks she is.

For me, it was a reminder why I’m not a big thriller reader. As good as a story may be, in the brief time I have available to read, I don’t think I love hanging out with the darkness and crimes that you need for the tension and twists to work.

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The bedside bookstack – March 2024

What’s sitting on the bedside bookstack this month.

Water by John Boyne, Doubleday, 2023

I’ve never read anything by John Boyne before but plenty of other people obviously have because the list of books he’s published comes in at 23 (including the Boy in the Striped Pyjamas).

You learn a thing or two after writing that many books and most noticeable for me was how well he did a first-person female narration. Vanessa Carvin goes to a remote Irish island to escape her recent past and think about her role in it. Initially all you know is that her husband is in jail and that there was scandal surrounding his trial. She had two daughters but one of them is dead and the other one won’t return her messages.

This is a great read about power, the choices we make and the silence we allow.

North Woods by Daniel Mason, John Murray 2023

You know me. I love short stories, so I love a novel which can stand as it is or be seen as a collection of connected shorts and you can’t deliver four centuries of a single house deep in the woods of New England, Massachusetts without changing characters. This was a lush book. His use of language is exquisite and I always know I’m in the hands of a master when I grieve one story ending but am completely absorbed by the next one within a few pages. How to pick a favourite from the apple-obsessed ex-serviceman, the spinster twins, the fated bohemian lovers or the fake mystic who actually saw ghosts. I loved the variation of the inhabitants and the different styles used for their narratives, a mix of straight first-person, diaries, letters, third-person, newspaper articles and even an imagined speech given to a local historical society. It also includes the most intense insect sex-scene (or perhaps the only) I’ve ever read.

Tin Man by Sarah Winman, Tinder Press, 2017

I love Sarah Winman. I should say that right up front. After reading Still Life I’ve been steadily reading through her back catalogue and listening to interviews. This is great one on The First Time Podcast. Tin Man has been hailed by many people as one of her best. I liked it. A lot. But I didn’t love it as much as the others. It is a story of grief and loss and all the things which never were. Amidst that of course, is life and love and all the things which happen instead but the weight of Ellis and Michael’s recollections as they look back on their lives was too heavy for this reader at this time.

Women & Children by Tony Birch, UQ, 2023

Joe Cluny isn’t looking for trouble. The nuns just don’t appreciate his spirit. He has scars on the palm of his hands from their punishment which he hides from his mum. When Joe’s Aunt turns up at their house bloody and bruised, he sees the violence men are also capable of. His mum and sister are the strongest women he knows, but even they are powerless to stop it happening again. It’s a loss of innocence to realise that it’s it everywhere despite the silence, women and children on the other end of men’s violence.

I’m looking forward to hearing Tony Birch talk about this book at the Newcastle Writers Festival next week.

The Vanishing Act of Esme Lennox by Maggie O’Farrell, Tinder Press, 2006

Yep, it’s back-to-back Maggie for me. I think I only have one or two books left on her backlist and one of them is already sitting on the bookstack for next month (The Hand That First Held Mine). If you’re looking for objectivity, don’t read any further. I just love her!

Esme Lennox is what they used to call ‘a handful’. She was an embarrassment to her colonial family in India and on moving to Edinburgh, becomes the cross her grandmother must bear. At 16, she is committed by her father to an institution and remains there for 60 years. When the facility is closed down, she’s released into the care of Iris, her sister’s granddaughter who never even know she existed. Families. Siblings. Secrets. And the dynamics are all pitch perfect. Told you she can’t do any wrong for me. 

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The bedside bookstack – February 2024

What’s sitting on the bedside bookstack this month.

This Must be the Place by Maggie O’Farrell, Tinder Press, 2016

She’s at it again. Maggie O’Farrell just being bloody brilliant! She does family dynamics with such precision and nuance. No one is perfect or a monster, more the composite of traits that come from their life experiences.

What I loved about this one was that each chapter was from the POV of different characters, sometimes really on the sideline but bumping up against our main crew in life somewhere. It could easily be read as a collection of short stories within a novel and as a short story lover, I’m a big fan of that – something Anne Tyler also does quite a bit.

I am. I am. I am. By Maggie O’Farrell, Tinder Press, 2017

Yes, it’s back-to-back Maggie for me! And guess what? She’s just as good with non-fiction as fiction. This is seventeen essays about brushes with death, hers and those close to her. It makes for beautiful reading and is a reminder of our mortality and how slender and unknown our relationship with it is. I loved it.

Days of Innocence and Wonder by Lucy Treloar, Picador, 2023

Till is running. She has been ever since her best friend was taken from their Kindergarten playground by a man. When she finds an abandoned train station in a remote South Australian town, she stops and starts to make a home. But there’s someone looking for her and as serious assaults start to happen in this quiet middle-of-nowhere town, she knows they’re getting closer. I read this book constantly looking over my shoulder.

As in her previous novels, the environment both natural and built plays its own part in the narrative. There’s also an interesting parallel memory narrative when Till spent lockdown with her parents. Lockdown is in novels now and always it’s interesting to read the fictionialised version of something we all lived through.

Eventually Everything Connects by Sarah Firth, Joan, 2023

This graphic novel of eight essays on uncertainty was something completely different in my reading pile. I’ve never experienced stream-of-consciousness in a visual format but this was it, a completely honest, curious, reflective and unpredictable journey along Sarah Firth’s thoughts on everything from the self to desire and joie de vivre. I loved her letting us be in her head!

If We Were Villains by M.L. Rio, Affirm Press, 2017

Did I mention I’m writing something which has an actor as a character? So, anything I’m reading which is also about actors, theatre, film etc, is great because it also counts as research. Tick.

A cross between Donna Tartt’s The Secret History and a complete edition of Shakespeare,

this is set in a prestigious American Arts college where the acting students only do Shakespeare. The seven 4th year students live and study in each other’s pockets. If you’re a Shakespeare fan, you’re going to love how effortlessly they can chat cutting lines from comedy to tragedy. But it’s their final year and while some students want to get out of type, others are finding it harder to distinguish between what’s real and on stage. Things get more tense and build until there’s a real body in the lake. If you don’t love Shakespeare or have much interest in behind-the-curtain details, then you’ll do a lot of skipping, but it was a total page-turner for me.

Harmoney by Whitney Hanson, Penguin Life, 2023

This collection of poetry is by a young TikTok poet. I’ve mentioned before that I don’t like poetry which makes me feels stupid. None of that here. These poems read more like diary entries. Thoughts. Asides to oneself. They are heavy with the grief of losing a best friend, which she did when she was 16. She’s 24 now and so time has passed and though the loss is still there, it shares a space with life, with the sun rising and bare feet on dry soil, with the shade of a favourite tree. The loss was very heavy to read page after page and we’re all just trying to stay afloat, so halfway through, I was happy to flick forwards and read the more hopeful pieces.  

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Sky Chase – The story of a short story

My short story Sky Chase has just been published in the anthology The Heart Will Find a Way. For the process-curious of you who like to know how the sausage is made, here is how it was for this piece.

Do you listen to the Pop Culture Parenting podcast? If you have kids or work with them, then you really should. It’s hosted by Dr Billy Garvey, a developmental paediatrician and Nick McCormack, a ‘developing parent’. These two are such great humans.  They are compassionate and curious and Dr Billy is exactly who you’d want to be your clinician. He’s such an advocate, so measured and thoughtful and reassuring but I digress.

The premise per episode is that they have a topic and pick a clip from a movie, then Billy speaks to it and the deeper dynamics going on. People can send in questions during the following week about the topic, for example resilience in kids, and he answers the questions. They also talk about their own parenting and every week they offer up a ‘Winslow’ for good parenting and a ‘Griswald’ for something they could’ve done better.

My story was inspired by one of Nick’s Winslows. He has two young daughters and one Sunday morning he gets them out of the house early so his partner can sleep. They’re in the car with no real direction and then they see some hot air balloons and just follow them wherever they go. You can listen to him tell it in Episode 25 (you’ll find it at 12 minutes 30 seconds).

My stories often start as an image. I see something and think, I want that in a story. I don’t know the hows or whys but I just need that image. I thought this image was so beautiful, the silent early-morning city, the air balloons floating and a car with three people and no direction suddenly finding one.

I keep a bit of a writing log, of what I’ve been working on, the date, how many words and how many minutes I was at it. I don’t know why. Sometimes it makes me feel good that I’m regularly sitting down. Other times it makes me feel pretty rubbish about how long it’s been since my last entry. I think it was a hangover from freelancing and logging words and minutes and working out where my hourly rate sat. It’s also interesting to see how some pieces are just pure labour and I can only squeeze out a few hundred words in an hour or two and others just flow.

According to the log, I wrote the Sky Chase draft in 3 sittings. 20 minutes – 370 words. Another 50 minutes took me to 1170 words. And 35 more minutes to finish the draft at 1670 words. So, it’s quite a short short story and was quicker to write than usual. And then I edited it in 3 40-minute sessions.

It was a lucky little piece that almost didn’t get submitted to the one call out and was then accepted.

The Heart Will Find a Way anthology is a memoir and fiction collection of 41 stories of heartache, heartbreak and heartbalm edited by Anjenette Fennell, Anne-marie Taplin and Megan Close Zavala.

I had a chat on ABC Breakfast with Jenny and Dan on Valentine’s Day about the book, my story and being a writer. You can hear the episode (pick it up around the 2 hour 4 minute mark) HERE.

If you’re in Newcastle and you’re looking for a copy, try Maclean’s Booksellers on Beaumont St, Betty Loves Books down at the Station or Harry Hartog Kotara.

For those elsewhere, you can order at your local bookstore with the ISBN (978-0-6455648-7-7) or through Amazon and Booktopia.

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The bedside bookstack – Summer 2023 & 2024

What’s sitting on the bedside bookstack this Summer.

Instructions for a Heatwave by Maggie O’Farrell, Tinder Press, 2013

Wow!!! I already loved Maggie O’Farrell and marvelled at how it is she does what she does in Hamnet. I liked The Marriage Portrait and After You’d Gone but this is one of those books where I just had to keep putting it down for a moment and taking it in. The thought on repeat was Yep, that’s exactly how it is!

She just nails it in this one with her observations of young children, her recreation of parenting, her family dynamics which are that perfect mix of infuriating and endearing and of course how irritated and scratchy everyone gets in the heat. I loved everything about this book and want to reread it again to see if I can pinpoint the alchemy and find how this perfection is possible.

The Body Country by Susie Anderson, Hachette, 2023

This collection of poetry captures all moments great and small, the memory of a mother or riding on the back seat of the school bus. She shares how sacred some of life’s simpler moments can be. There is a strong sense of place, Country and culture throughout the collection and it’s just as good to have on the bedside and read one at a time as it is to just gobble up.  

Complement this with her interview on the First Time Podcast. She has some sage and beautiful words about process which I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about.

Games and Rituals by Katherine Heiny, 4th Estate, 2023

Love short stories. Tick. Big fan of Katherine Heiny. Tick. So, obviously her short story collection was very welcome under the Christmas tree. If you’re not familiar with Heiny from Early Morning Riser or Standard Deviation, let me prepare you. Expect giggles, bad decisions, regrettable sex, characters who walk to the beat of their own drum, plenty of ‘oh no she didn’t’,  the quotidian at its very best and worse and moments of truth so uncomfortable that you just need a moment to let it sink in.

Lioness by Emily Perkins, Bloomsbury, 2023

If you like angry ageing women having a gutful and shedding their usual social niceties, then this cracker of a book is for you. Throw in some wealthy voyeurism and pitch perfect blended family dynamics, personal identity and the ethics of privilege and it still doesn’t do justice to the energy and breadth of this story.

Therese comes from humble beginnings but has married older and into money. When her developer husband is accused of corruption she starts to question blind loyalty. At the same time her neighbour, Claire, is suddenly liberating herself from everything she’s been told to be as a woman – mother, wife, employee. She’s made strong by presence of something primal and innate and proximity to this makes Therese wonder who she is anymore after all these years of adapting and who she might be if she too just dropped the act.

The Sitter by Angela O’Keefe, UQP, 2023

In the early outbreak of COVID, an Australian writer sits in her Paris hotel room trying to write a book about Hortense Cezanne, Paul Cezanne’s wife. She often struggles with it and eventually it is her own story that comes out as a gift for her daughter.

Hortense narrates the story. She’s been released from the past and watches the writer as she moves through the motions. There’s a touch of the Claire Keegan in this story, in the unhurried actions and observations as women’s lives and regrets play out quietly.

Clock Dance by Anne Tyler, Chatto & Windus, 2018

This is only my second Anne Tyler. French Braidwas my first andI love loved how it was put together almost as a set of linked short stories. Clock dance is similar except the stories always follow Willa Drake and the final one is much longer than any of the others. We see the 24 hours her mother goes missing when she’s a teenager, the day she is incidentally proposed to in her twenties, the accident that kills her first husband 20-years later and the phone call she gets to come and look after the daughter of her son’s ex-girlfriend.

It’s hard to describe Anne Tyler but she’s all about the quotidian and relationships and for me that’s where all the gold is!

Salt River Road by Molly Schmidt, Fremantle Press, 2023

The previous three books I’ve read have been set in New York, Baltimore and Paris, so it was brilliant to be back under Southern skies in Molly Schmidt’s debut. It made me realise how important local stories and publishers are.

Set in Noongar country in South Western Australia, this follows the Tetley family and its five children in the immediate aftermath of their mother’s death. Grief, racism, legacy and family all play out under the hot sun and long days of a summer of loss.

Absolutely & Forever by Rose Tremain, Chatto & Windus, 2023

Marianne falls in love with Simon Hurst when she’s still at high school. She loses her virginity to him and they swap letters but then he moves to Paris. It’s 1960s England and her options to ‘make something of herself’ are down to marriage or secretarial work. She’d happily marry Simon but that’s not going to happen.

This is the story of a broken heart and how life does goes on, eventually.

Revolutionary Road by Richard Yates, Vintage 2009

I only knew this as a movie from the mid-noughties. It had Kate and Leo who made it look good like they do with everything. I now know that though they’re good at what they do, a large part was because they had excellent material to work with.

The story is actually pretty depressing, two people who thought that they’d make more of themselves or for themselves desperately trying to revive (Him) and survive (her) their life together in the suburbs with two young kids.

It’s so oppressive and stifling but so magnificently written. With a light touch he scratches the surface and there it all is the gaslighting, power plays, dishonesties and desires that can get normalised in relationships and parade themselves around as love.

Cult Classic by Sloane Crosley, Bloomsbury, 2022

Lola is the chronically cynical, pithy quipping thirty-something we’ve come to expect from New York narrations. She’s engaged but unsure and suddenly starts bumping into ex-boyfriends everywhere.

I didn’t finish this one. It’s clever and funny and there’s plenty of people who love the super-cynic but I was sick in bed and needed a little more wonder and a little less over-everything in my life.

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