Category: short stories

The bedside bookstack –March 2025

The Night Watchman by Louise Erdrich, Corsair, 2020

This book is loosely based on Louise Erdrich’s grandfather who rallied the Turtle Mountain Reservation Chippewa Council and surrounding communities to stand against the US government’s 1953 ‘Emancipation Bill’.

The story is told along parallel lines following Thomas Wazhushk, the Night Watchman and his niece Pixie Paranteau who is searching for her sister who has left for the city but hasn’t been heard from. It’s Louise Erdrich, and a good story is always safe in her hands, so it’s a rich read in both form and content.

Bunny by Mona Awad, Head of Zeus, 2019

Hmmm. This one starts off whip-smart with our narrator’s arch observations of her teachers and fellow classmates at a prestigious arts college hitting just the right notes. But as things continued it felt like one of those movies where the preview is better than the movie.

It’s dark, satirical and subversive but after 200 hundred odd pages of Stepford-wifesque sorority girls creating perfect men from fluffy rabbits, it was just too OTT. I know, probably the point.

The End and Everything Before It by Finegan Kruckemeyer, Text, 2024

This debut reads like fable with its magic realist jumps in time and its looping in on itself as we revisit the same hill and stretch of coastline again and again seeing how the people slot into place before and after each other.

There is a building on the hill which was a prison and then a hospital, an orphanage and then knocked down and reforested. We meet an occupant from each iteration and see how their heart and hope changed things a little for those who came next.

You don’t have to have a dream by Tim Minchin, Penguin 2024

This very readable little number is an illustrated collection of three speeches Tim Minchin gave at various institutions and an introduction to each. He has so much heart and it’s all out on his sleeve here. These are words to reassure and guide creatives and I’d have to say that some of them came at just the right time for me.

Following the Moon by James Norbury, Michael Joseph, 2024

This is another book for conflicted creatives. It carries the message of ‘keep going’ and ‘it’s the journey not the destination’ through the simple illustrated story of a little lost puppy and the wolf who tries to lead her back to her parents by following the moon.

James Norbury also wrote Big Panda and Tiny Dragon, which has apparently sold millions of copies. I’m glad he’s found his audience because he also has a lot of heart and in our loud world it’s nice to see that there’s still room for quiet reassurances.

The Dangers of Smoking in Bed by Mariana Enriquez, Granta, 2021

These short stories are a walk on the dark side – hauntings, madness, missing children, abject desires and base behaviour. From Buenos Aires to Madrid, they’re always in the shadows where motives are suspect and it’s hard to find the light. A little heavy for my head at the time though, alas.

Out of Sheer Rage by Geoff Dyer, Canongate, 1997

I ended up in a state of sheer rage that I picked this book up for 5 hours worth of train trip. Geoff Dyer wants to write a book about D.H. Laurence, not just yet, maybe he’ll write a novel first. No. He’s definitely going to start the D.H. Laurence book. But he might do some notes for the novel before that.

On it goes, page after page, procrastinating through European cities and Mediterranean islands. I’m too busy dealing with my own indecisiveness and anxiety to relish reading about someone else’s in such forensic detail. It drove me mad and I jumped ship. Funny how some things can be such a miss. It came recommended with such high praise from a festival interview.

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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 – 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 – 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 – 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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The bedside bookstack – September 2023

What’s sitting on the bedside bookstack this September.

A Swim in a Pond in the Rain by George Saunders, Vintage, 2021

What’s the next best thing to being one of the 5 or 6 students every year who nab a spot in George Saunders’ writing class at Syracuse University? Reading this book because it absolutely feels like you’re one of the 5 or 6 students in George Saunders’ nineteenth-century Russian short story in translation class!!

This one is for the readers as well as the writers. He takes 7 short stories from Chekhov, Turgenev, Tolstoy and Gogol, includes them in the book and then discusses each one. For anyone who misses the close-reading of high school or university English, this is for you. He fossicks around and asks questions and delicately takes the story apart. Then he polishes each part and by the time you finish your reading, it’s been put back together as something better and brighter. I’m loving the meticulousness of this!

Fifty-Two Stories by Anton Chekhov, Bloomsbury Publishing, 2021

I mean really, what can you say about Chekhov? That he’s timeless. That he’s nailed it. Nailed us – our dynamics and foibles and joys. He can tell a tale about an aristocrat or a farmer and it can seem like it’s about nothing but then ta-da it reveals itself to be about everything.

I feel like he’s a bit of a Helen Garner where all of life’s small moments somehow turn up on the page to be much more than the sum of their parts. This is a gem to have on the bedside table. Dip in and out. I guess the 52 is neatly suggesting a year of Chekhov. The temptation with good short stories though, is to gobble them all up.

(Incidentally, not inspired by a Swim in a Pond in the Rain. I was already reading this one)

Tell me who I am by Una Mannion, Faber, 2023

Deena Garvey has gone missing. She’s a loving mother to Ruby and a dedicated NICU nurse but a history of mental illness allows people to think that she’s done a runner. Her sister Nessa knows this isn’t the case. She thinks that Lucas, Deena’s ex-partner had something to do with it. When Lucas moves back to his childhood farm in Vermont with Ruby, he creates a new story about what happened.

Narrated over 20 years by Ruby and Nessa, this is a compelling read about family, control, loyalty and lies.

Brutus and Other Heroines by Harriet Walter, Nick Hern Books, 2016

This book was brilliant! Every so often I think it’s time I read some Shakespeare and that I really should read one of his plays I haven’t studied or seen. But time marches on and it seems too much like hard work.

Harriet Walter (who a lot of people will recognise from Succession and Ted Lasso) has appeared in productions for the Royal Shakespear Company for over 30 years. She has played every major female and male Shakespeare character and this book is a fascinating insight into the approach an individual actor and the cast as a collective take with each new production.

It’s also a great way to catch up on your unknown Shakespear’s. Instead of a plot summary, you get the close-reading and analysis of someone who needs to understand the characters well enough to embody them.

For me it was a great three-for-one. It was a refresher on plays I knew, an introduction to those I’d never read or seen and research for my novel.

Getting into Character – 7 Secrets a Novelist Can Learn From Actors by Brandilyn Collins, John Wiley & Sons, 2002

Notice the dramatic flavour that’s turning up on the pile? If you’re not interested in acting or writing, then skip to the next book. I’m doing research for my main character who is an actor and this book was a great two-for-one reading about acting as well as applying it to characterisation in your writing.

The premise is to take the seven characterisation techniques of method acting and suggest how they can be used by writers to create believable characters with depth who are able to create drama and tension.

I’ve never been much of a craft reader. I think I read a few duds early on and was arrogant enough to think there wasn’t much to learn (excuse me while I roll my eyes at youthful ego and a wasted decade or two) but I’ve just joined a Hunter Writer’s Centre Book club which only reads books on the craft of writing. Anyway, this was a crash course in method acting and tips on how to make better characters, so tick and tick.

The Pearl by John Steinbeck, Penguin, 2011

I love Steinbeck. In fact one of the few craft books I have read and loved was his Journal of a Novel.  But this was a DNF for me. It’s set up as a fable and reads as a fable with an exaggerated tone to the characters and events and I’m just expecting something way more detailed and nuanced from him.

Kino finds a pearl which he wants to sell, so his son Coyotito can go to school and have a better life than his father. But having something precious makes you a target and reveals the potential we all have for greed and violence.

For a modern reader, there’s also a white American writing about a peasant Mexican family. There is context. Steinbeck has a lot of lived experience growing up in Southern America and living for a while in Mexico. It was 1947 and he was deliberately writing about people who were invisible to his big city readership but I’m reading it in 2023 and that has context too.

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The bedside bookstack – February 2023

What’s teetering on the bedside bookstack this February.

Fates and Furies by Lauren Groff, Windmill Books, 2015

Whoa! I’ve never read any Lauren Groff before. Will need to look up her back catalogue. This is dense and intense and amazing and intricate. It puts Mathilde and Lotto’s marriage under the microscope, exposing the stuff of entwined lives – the dynamics, habits, secrets and lies.

Read this! It’s magnificent – her casual asides during narration, her watertight characters and the care and details she gives the reader. But it tapped back into my fury at reading The Wife by Meg Wolitzer, that ol’ story of a woman facilitating the life of a ‘creative genius’. Lotto doesn’t have to pay a bill or make a meal or clean a bathroom. He has an attic room and is left undisturbed. One day, I’d love to read a book about the man who offers himself up so completely in service to his wife’s creative endeavours. If it’s already been written, please let me know.

Joan by Katherine J. Chen, Hodder & Stoughton, 2022

Somehow, we all know about Joan of Arc but in my case, not much. She fought. She was burnt at the stake but I don’t know the why and when of any of it. I certainly had no idea she died at 19!!

Katherine Chen’s Joan is fascinating. She’s a scrapper and an underdog formed by trauma and grief. The story starts with her as a child then moves on to her adolescence and continues as she leaves home and eventually ends up at court with the Dauphin. Her early family dynamics are as interesting as the court politics and military campaigns. This is a real epic!

Smart Ovens for Lonely People by Elizabeth Tan, Brio, 2020

I’m loving dipping in and out of these short stories and I love how often I just sit there staring into space after a certain sentence has just sliced right to the heart of it. It being us, humans, modern life, consumption, relationships, internal worlds, insecurities, just all of it. And she’s so effortlessly clever about it too. In other writing, the slightly off-centre is the focus. These stories however, are so sure of themselves that the unusual is just an aside for everything else which is at play.

Denizen by Hames McKenzie Watson, Viking, 2022

No one ever said a thriller was going to be a comfortable read but I wasn’t expecting this to be as unnerving as it was. I was completely creeped out reading this at night. You start with a remote location, you add in an act of abject violence, let the guilt simmer, suppress it, ratchet up the paranoia and mix in some hallucinations but wait, maybe they’re not hallucinations….maybe they are. This is the seesaw you get as a reader, unsure who to trust or what you’re seeing. The past never stays put and James McKenzie Watson does a very good job of bringing it all back.

I also recommend his podcast on writing with Ashley Kalagian Blunt James and Ashley stay at home. Not scary at all! And for those of you in and around Newcastle, he’s coming to the Newcastle Writer’s Festival in April.

The Luminous Solution by Charlotte Wood, Allen & Unwin, 2021

This book of essays is about the creative life, inspiration, process and our inner worlds. I’ll never tire of reading about writers’ thoughts on writing. Not every essay resonated for me, but they don’t all have to. There’s plenty to take away when you glimpse someone else’s practice and are open to ideas. Particularly interesting if you enjoyed her novel The Natural Way of Things to read about process, intentions and her experiences of writing it.

Bear Woman by Karolina Ramqvist, Manilla Press, 2021

I so wanted to love this. The cover beckoned with the words Myth. Motherhood. Hidden History. The blurb talked of Marguerite, a French noble-woman who was abandoned, pregnant on a small island in what is now Nova Scotia and the Swedish writer who is wrestling with how to write the story.

I thought there would be interesting parallels and linkages but instead it’s a detailed catalogue of research and its frustrations. I would have put it down by now but I still want to know what happens to Marguerite and all we’ve been given so far is allusions. I think this might be a skim-til-the-end situation.

Ariel by Sylvia Plath, Faber, 1968

Thought it was time I dipped into a bit of Sylvia Plath. I read the Bell Jar in high school and some of her poems then too and always interested to see what I’ll make of reading it as an adult. Well, it’s another one I won’t make it to the end of. I always feels like the failure is mine when I don’t ‘get’ poetry, find a way into it and have a feel for it. So, I’ll do a quiet retreat and won’t open another poetry book until I’ve forgotten all about this and start thinking, ‘I should really read some poetry again’.

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The bedside bookstack – May & June 2022

What’s teetering on the bedside bookstack this month.

The House of Youssef by Yumna Kassab, Giramondo, 2019

This is a collection of short stories, some much shorter than others. We’re in and then out of these lives catching parents, friends, a bridal couple, neighbours and relatives in a slice of their lives.

In the middle section, we are introduced to the Youssef family and we stay with them longer. A whole series of stories follow the daughter Mayada, brother Abdullah, mother Sumaya and father Najeeb. We watch the family slowly dissolve until there is no one left.

Next, I’m heading on to her novel Australiana which is described as ‘thematically connected vignettes’. Right up my alley. And she has another novel coming out at the end of the year, The Lovers. Can’t wait.

Amy and Isabelle by Elizabeth Strout, Scribner, 1997

The crazy thing is that this was Elizabeth Strout’s first published book which means she’s only got better since then.

Amy and Isabelle are a tight mother-daughter duo but the hot summer that Amy is 15 their proximity and co-dependence becomes unbearable. The POV hovers between them and then, as with all of Elizabeth Strout’s book it flits around like a butterfly, landing briefly on colleagues, neighbours and people in their town.

Life is enough for Elizabeth Strout. No need for plot twists or cliff-hangers. The intimate and complex dynamics that people share with each other is more than enough for her. Like Helen Garner elevates the quotidian in her non-fiction, Elizabeth Strout does the same with fiction.

The Torrent by Dinuka McKenzie, HarperCollins, 2022

This Australian crime debut won the 2020 Banjo Prize and was great COVID isolation reading. Every time I read crime, I think ‘thanks for thinking all of this us for me!’. The detail in the clues and timelines, alibis and relationships and how it all has to fit together seem like a lot of work to me, so I’m glad there are people who do it and do it well.

Detective Sergeant Kate Miles is one week off maternity leave but a recent armed hold-up and an informal review of a closed case make the handover a busy one. I loved the Northern Rivers setting, the inclusion of a home life and this no-nonsense Detective.

Found, Wanting by Natasha Sholl, Ultimo Press, 2022

I do comms for a cardiovascular research organisation and Sudden Cardiac Death is a research priority. We hear the stories but I’ve never read 275 pages of what is left in its wake. This is a book about grieving a young and sudden death. It’s heavy and messy and as relentless as loss. But it’s also honest and generous and full of life. Not easy all-ironed-out-now-cos-the-requisite-time-has-passed life but unpredictable, not always solvable but still sometimes wonderful life. 

The Sentence by Louise Erdrich, HarperCollins 2021

I’m a big Louise Erdrich fan but I think this landed on the pile at the wrong time for me (during COVID).

Tookie has turned her life around. While she was in jail, she read everything she could find and now that she’s out, she works in a local bookstore specialising in Indigenous writing. She’s Potawatomi. When Flora, one of their customers, dies and starts to haunt the shop, Tookie thinks that by reading Flora’s last book, she’ll be able to see the ghost off.

This book is a series of vignettes with customers and staff. Should be just my thing but I didn’t reach for it and in the end, I stopped trying.

Friends & Dark Shapes by Kavita Bedford, Text Publishing, 2021

This book is about youth and grief, together in the case of our narrator. She’s in her share house and at parties and turning up to multiple jobs but she’s skating over the surface of it all. Her dad has just died and her mum has returned to India and she is free floating though it all having clever conversations and going to the right places but clearly lost and looking for something more to anchor her.

A warning if you’re not a fan of Sydney – the city plays a lead role in this one.

Hovering by Rhett Davis, Hachette, 2022

Alice Wren is an artist and activist on the run from herself amongst other things. Her sister Lydia is doing everything apparently right but lives for her hours in an arboreal virtual world where she creates and sustains plants. Her son George has taken a political vow of silence. They live in the city of Fraser where the streets and landmarks change position overnight.

Original, yes. Genre-bending, yes. Unsettling, oh my god yes. Sooo, if you’re already feeling wobbly because of interest rate hikes and unaffordable petrol and lettuce, then leave this one until things feel more stable. The ground is literally and continuously shifting beneath their feet.

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