Tag: book lovers

The bedside bookstack –February 2025

Limberlost by Robbie Arnott, Text, 2022

This is the coming-of-age story of Ned West recollected over a lifetime. Ned lives on Limberlost, an apple orchard in a Northern Tasmanian river valley. His mother is dead and his two brothers are away at war. One sends letters, the other they have no news from. His father is silent and sister distant.

Ned traps rabbits and reams of escape on the boat their pelts will help him to buy. It’s always part myth with Robbie Arnott (but this one is a bit of a deviation from the magic realism of Flames and The Rain Heron) and the natural world is ever-present in all its mystery and majesty. By the end of it, you’ll want to lay your hands on the smooth grain of Huon pine and smell the spice of it, which is conjured in such great detail. For me this gorgeous read is his best book so far. I can’t wait to read his newest book Dusk.

Australian Gospel by Lech Blaine, Black Inc, 2024

This memoir is a reminder that love really does conquer all. Lech Blaine’s parent’s Lenore and Tom Blaine foster 5 children over their life time. All of these children become a permanent part of their family. Three of them are biological siblings. They’re the children of Mary and Micheal Shelley, Christian zealots who have also had one other child removed from their care. The Shelley’s spend nearly two decades trying to get their children back through any means including kidnapping, coercion, harassment, and stalking.

This is the story of how the Blaine family survived the Shelley siege but not without cost.

In Memoriam by Alice Winn, Viking, 2023

You’ll need a quiet moment as you read this to grapple with the pointless loss of life that war is, for everyone, on any side. And even those that live, aren’t necessarily surviving.

This is a beautiful heartbreaking book about a handful of boys from a prestigious British boarding school. They’re clever and cocky and charming and they are so so young. Two of them, are in love. As war breaks out some can enlist and others have to wait until they’re older. The details of their days and the emotional attrition of the front is so evocative and well written. I didn’t think I needed to read another war book but this one is something special.

Long Island by Colm Toibin, Picador, 2024

This is the sequel to Brooklyn. Again, it centres on Eilis Lacey. 20 years have passed since the love story from Brooklyn. She’s Eilis Fiorello now, happily married with two teenage children. One day a man visits to tell her that his wife is having her husband’s baby and that he’ll drop it off with them when it’s born.

Eilis has made a decision about this. She won’t have that child brought up in her family and she hopes that her husband Tony will come to the same conclusion while she goes back to Ireland to visit her mother. Everyone’s lives back there have continued, including Jim Farrell who she was briefly together with in the past.

I liked but didn’t love this one which was a surprise. Usually, I’m instantly in for anything written by Colm Toibin but there was a distance between the main characters which made it difficult to emotionally connect – which comes back to the question of characters and if they have to be likeable or not, or what it is you need to give the reader as consolation if they can’t latch onto their protagonist.

i want to die but I want to eat tteokbokki by baek sehee, Bloomsbury, 2018

I picked this book up because of the ‘runaway Korean bestseller’ exclamation on the front and because I wanted to know what tteobokki is. It’s Korean street food, a hot spicy rice cake.

Baek Sehee has dysthymia which is a state of constant light depression. This is a record of conversations with her psychiatrist over 12 weeks. I think readers of this probably fall into four categories; those who feel seen and heard that someone else is articulating what they are feeling, those who are fascinated with our own internal journeys, those who are trying to stay buoyant with their own baggage and don’t need to be reading about anyone else’s and those who are bored by the granular details of another person’s thoughts.

She’s Always Hungry by Eliza Clark, faber, 2024

This collection of short stories is clever and original. It’s a dark read. Its inversions and examinations take some of the worst that the modern world has to offer especially when it comes to gender relations and violence. It’s not what my head needs at the moment, so despite the writing and ingenuity, I didn’t get very far.

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The bedside bookstack –Summer 2024/2025

Tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow by Gabrielle Zevin, Chatto & Windus, 2022

It was impossible for me to not be completely immersed in this and invested in the characters. It’s friendship, creation, loss, collaboration, loyalty and love that isn’t romantic set against the backdrop of late nineties gaming (both the design and playing). A huge surprise to this non-gamer how fascinating it can be. Gave me lots to think about re the creative process and how much of yourself you need to put into art and what that then means for collaborations. So clever. So interesting. A real surprise. Loved it. Loved it. Loved it.

Sidelines by Karen Viggers, Allen & Unwin, 2024

Anyone who has ever stood on the sidelines of a kid’s sports team will find familiar territory here. The junior development league sounds exhausting. As the stakes get higher for this team, what is supposed to be a game, is clearly much more, at least for the adults involved.

We’ve all got a story behind us and with each chapter dedicated to a parent or team member, actions and behaviour make more sense. This looks at kid’s sport as a way for parents to live out unrealised ambition, personal inadequacies, and competitive tendencies. A sobering take on gender, ambition and how we all play a part in turning something fun completely toxic.

Stoneyard Devotional by Charlotte Wood, Allen & Unwin, 2023

I’m always curious about what a writer is trying to nut out for themselves when they write their novels. Some circle around the same themes, some keep core ones and swap others in and out.this novel feels very much like a reckoning with ageing and mortality, looming environmental changes and disaster, regret, forgiveness and grief.

There’s plenty of time for our main character to reflect on all of this after she joins an isolated religious order near her hometown in regional New South Wales. Contemplative, she works over and again areas of her life she hasn’t yet reconciled, rhythmic and reflective just like her days. 

The Paper Palace by Miranda Cowley Heller, Viking, 2021

Elle Bishop and her family have summered in Cape Cod for generations. One summer she meets Jonas. The two spend all their time together. In the opening pages we find her with three children and a husband. It’s 20 years after she and Jonas met and the night before she slept with him for the first time.

Get ready, you’ll go forwards, backwards and side-step into her parents’ early life and subsequent marriages. It builds up all the layers of what leads to the night between her and Jonas and what will happen after it. I was totally absorbed by all these characters and didn’t want our time to be over.

I spent Christmas day in bed with food poisoning (I know, it feels like a metaphor for something) and was so happy to have this tome on loan from my sister – the absolute perfect summer read (bed-ridden or otherwise). As an Australian reader, the only thing I wished was that I could read something equally as nostalgic and reminiscent of an Australian summer.

Diving, Falling by Kylie Mirmohamadi, Scribe, 2024

One of the reasons I miss Twitter is because I no longer see Kylie Mirmohamadi’s insightful tweets about writers, writing, Virginia Woolf, nature, food and family among many other things. She’s on Instagram but as anyone who remembers the good times knows, you can’t share in the same way. However, you can still find her Writers on Writing list which is ever expanding and an amazing resource for those who love reading about personal process. So, it was like a peep-behind-the-curtain to see a lot of her loves share space in Diving, Falling, her debut novel.

Leila Whittaker is now the widow of a famous Australian artist. He is almost as large in death as he was in life. Leila also has two adult sons. As they all navigate their grief, Leila decides she’s had enough of the eternal people-pleasing and passive acceptance of the-way-things-are. This covers the thorny territory of a family renegotiating their dynamics as new people come into their lives and old habits are shed.

Good Material by Dolly Alderton, Fig Tree, 2023

Alan and Jen have just broken up. Alan didn’t see it coming and is completely heartbroken. His career as a comedian has also flatlined and he has too much time to wonder where it all went wrong.

This came with a v high-praise back cover (quotes about tears by page 5, endless laughs and stop-you-in-your-tracks-heart-wrenching), so I feel like a bit of an ice queen for getting a bit ho-hum reading about Alan’s misery. Can’t figure it out. Heartbreak is the absolute worst and I usually have a lot more sympathy for it but his neediness was a lot to carry. I guess now we know how Jen felt.

Florida by Lauren Groff, Penguin Random House, 2018

You’re always in good hands with Lauren Groff. These short stories are so rich and dense, maybe because we revisit some of the characters again, so it’s not just a one-off slice of their life. The narrators are not all likeable which makes for an even more interesting read. And Florida is always there with its extremes of weather, its endemic creatures (god, there’s always a snake curling around something which was a lot for this non-snake lover) and its sticky humidity in this already warming world.

Still Life with Bread Crumbs by Anna Quindlen, Random House, 2013

Rebecca Winter moves to a small forest cabin in upstate New York to cut costs and retreat from the uncertainty that comes with waning creative fame. Her iconic photographic series ‘Still Life With Bread Crumbs’ doesn’t bring in royalties or requests to appear any more.

This is a slow burn but a really nice read about making changes, second chances, creativity and unlikely love.

Stories by Helen Garner, Text, 2017

This is a collection of 17 of Helen Garner’s short stories. I’m a big fan of Garner. I love hearing her speak, reading her diaries and essays and articles but here’s something which feels like blasphemy, I didn’t get beyond the fourth story in this collection. I know. And I really tried but at this end of the year when there are so many other things waiting to be read, if you’re not feeling it, you’re not feeling it, regardless of the name behind it. I think I needed more narrative and less lens-on-a-moment for it to be a short story. And if the title wasn’t Stories and I was expecting diary entries, would I have read it differently?

Mad About You by Mhairi McFarlane, Harper Collins, 2022

Just what the summer ordered, a Mhairi McFarlane rom-com with a cad, a catch, a totally capable and sassy protagonist and of course the possibility of a happy ending. There’s flatmate-proximity, coercive control, online trolling, loyalty in friendship and misleading first impressions. Done. Easy comfort read sorted.

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The bedside bookstack – October 2024

What’s sitting on the bedside bookstack this month.

Solider Sailor by Claire Kilroy, faber, 2023

Soldier speaks this story Sailor, to her baby boy. She tells him of his birth and the early months of his life. She advises him on what to be and not to be in this world and she apologises for the backdrop to his first years when she and Sailor’s father fought and she nearly let all of them go.

She speaks like a madwoman telling all our truths and she is mad with the lack of sleep, the exhaustion, the relentless repetition of those early days of motherhood and the sudden gender division of labour. This is such a sucker punch of read – visceral and all-consuming. You feel like you’re drowning with her, so maybe one for when you’re out of the trenches and sleeping through the night again yourself.

Orbital by Samantha Harvey, Random House, 2024

Six astronauts orbit around the earth over a 24 hour period. That’s it. That’s what happens in this book but it is beautiful and poetic and slowed me down until it felt more like a meditation than a narrative.

As they go about their daily tasks, they think about their lives and their loved ones. They look down on the world as life down there wakes up and goes to sleep again. They record the growing fury of a typhoon for meteorological services back on earth and they wonder about the vast space that opens up when they look in any direction other than earth. Grand in content and contained in style, this is like the space version of a Claire Keegan book. Just gorgeous.

Sky Song by C. A. Wright, Pantera Press, 2024

CA Wright was our October Books at the Bowlo guest. It’s always a treat to read a book and then get more insight into it from both a craft and content angle.

Oriane is the Skylark. She sings the sun and a new day into being every morning. To many she is just a myth. Her father has kept her hidden in safety but as she grows so does her curiosity about what is out there beyond their isolated home in the woods. There is another myth. This one is about the Nightingale who sings forth the darkness each evening and if Oriane is real, perhaps the Nightingale is too.

This is based on a Hans Christian Anderson story. I don’t know the original but I’m always curious about what was kept and shed in the rewrite.

The Emotional Craft of Fiction by Donald Maas, Writer’s Digest Books, 2016

Boom!! That was my head exploding into smithereens while reading this book. Donald Maas is New York literary agent and after reading thousands of manuscripts he started to wonder why some brilliantly plotted and/or written books still didn’t make much of an impression on him.

His analysis is that it is the emotional impact and connection with a book which makes it stand out from others. He lays out different methods for achieving emotional engagement and includes excerpts and exercises with each. This book is a brilliant mix of theory and practice and is now in my Top 3 Writing Books. Yep. That’s saying something.

Oh, what are the other 2 you ask. George Saunders’ A Swim in the Pond in the Rain and Natalie Goldberg’s Writing Down the Bones. I just keep going back to them again and again and I can see how this will be the same.

The Writer’s Library by Nancy Pearl & Jeff Schwager, Harper One, 2020

I know, no one needs more to add to their book list but….I’m a big fan of reading about writers and certainly very happy to take their book recommendations. Each chapter is dedicated to a writer and set out in Q and A style from their early reading to reading which made them want to write, reading which influenced certain works of theirs and what they’re reading now. And instead of having to take notes and add books as you’re reading it, there’s a list at the end of each chapter for all the books which were mentioned!

Just as a warning, it’s an American book, thus US writers only which could be limiting for some readers but I picked and chose a bit and loved that my current fiction fan-girl recipient, Jennifer Egan, was featured.

Wall by Jen Craig, Puncher & Wattman, 2023

An artist returns to Australia to clear out her father’s house after his death. She has plans to turn it into an installation but the reality of a hoarder’s house and the history it holds for her make it a much more complicated task. I’ve only just started this. The stream-of-consciousness prose is densely packed, almost like the narrator’s thoughts are mirroring the clutter she stands in. She jumps from art theory to family memories to her current situation in the same way that she notices and moves on from the objects around her. Not a tired bedtime read, methinks.

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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 – 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 – 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 – 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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The bedside bookstack – November 2023

What’s sitting on the bedside bookstack this month.

Tom Lake By Ann Patchett, Bloomsbury Publishing, 2023

It’s lockdown and Lara’s three daughters have come back home to their cherry farm to help with the harvest. In between the picking they demand that it’s time to hear the full story about their mother’s life as an actress and the summer she spent with Peter Duke who is now a famous actor but was just starting out like the rest of them back then.

This is Ann Patchett. She knows what she’s doing and a dual narrative comes off just fine in her hands. She also knows how to get in there a play around with personal dynamics and ideas about loyalty, love, creative ability, ambition and ageing. I loved the present sibling and family narrative as much as the summer at Tom Lake. This’ll be a great summer read, settle in for some seasonal nostalgia.

The Jaguar by Sarah Holland-Blatt, UQP, 2022

Sometimes poetry makes me feel stupid. I read it and just can’t find a way in. I don’t like feeling stupid, so I don’t read a lot of poetry. But that’s a shame, because it isn’t all like that and I’m so glad that this won the 2023 Stella Prize and was on the radar enough for me to pick it up.

It doesn’t make me feel stupid. It makes me see the world with fresh eyes. It makes me even more curious about words, sounds, rhythm and pace and how I could use it to better effect in my own writing. She has a lovely way of dusting some words off as well, that have been sitting on the shelf for a long time and deserve to find themselves on a page again.

For me, this collection is at its best when she recalls her father and his 20-year deterioration with Parkinson’s Disease and subsequent death. There isn’t anywhere for poets to hide with the omnipresent ‘I’ and she’s so generous with what she shares.

A Year of Marvellous Ways by Sarah Winman, Tinder Press 2015

Sarah Winman is one of my literary heroes. I just love her to bits and pieces for bringing Still Life into the world. She has so much heart and humanity in her writing and that’s present not just in a masterpiece like Still Life but also in a quieter novel like A Year of Marvellous Ways.

Marvellous Ways is a 90-year-old woman who lives in a caravan on the sea. Francis Drake is a 28-year-old soldier who had nothing to come back to in England after the war. When their paths cross Marvellous gets a chance to relive the past and Drake finally looks to the future. If you didn’t like Still Life or you need total realism in your narrative then give this one a miss. Otherwise, savour as it’s another Sarah Winman delight.

For any Winman fangirls like me, this interview she did on The First Time Podcast confirms she’s just as warm and wonderful a human as you’d think she would be.

Amy’s Children by Olga Masters, Text Publishing, 1987

I’m ashamed to say that this is the first Olga Masters I’ve read. I feel like I owe more to an Australian female writer publishing at a time when the scene was so male. Ne’er mind. I’ll be looking up her backlist now.

Amy’s husband leaves her and her three young daughters during the Depression. Living on the family farm in rural NSW, she then leaves her daughters to try and find work in Sydney. Work is scarce but no one will hire a married woman, so she makes herself slightly younger and unmarried on any applications.

This is a fascinating insight into Depression and war-time Australia, especially society’s ideas of women and the paths open to them. It’s also a nuanced offering of a mother leaving her children and atypical mother-daughter relationships. People will come down on all sides about Amy leaving her children and pretending when her eldest daughter arrives in Sydney, that she’s actually her sister. Definitely an Australian classic!

The Little Stranger by Sarah Waters, Virago, 2009

This book opens post World War One in rural Warwickshire. You’ve got the landed gentry in their slowly crumbling Georgian manor, the two house staff they can afford, a local doctor and a family of new money just moved from London.

This is beautifully written. I feel like I’m in an episode of Downton Abbey and so obviously in good hands. However, I’m 136 pages in (of 500) and it’s starting to get creepy. There are unexplained incidents in the house and a few people are starting to admit to feeling a malevolent presence. And it’s around about now that I think I’m going to put it down. I do most of my reading at night and I still haven’t totally squared myself with the dark. I don’t love scary, so I’ve called time on it. All those who like a bit of Henry James’ spooky house spirit vibe, read on.

Think Like a Monk by Jay Shetty, Thorsons, 2020

Like many of us, I’m on a journey to get a bit more calm in my life and improve the way I deal with stress. I heard Jay Shetty on the Dear Therapist podcast (my version of voyeurism which also happen to have good life advice) and they talked about this book.

After working in finance in London, he ends up moving to India and being a monk for three years. It isn’t out of the blue – he’d been spending his summers in an ashram throughout uni but it was still a huge life change. He shares his experiences of that time and teachings mixed in with modern examples to offer suggestions to ‘train your mind for peace and purpose every day’. If you’re already interested and open to these ideas, you’ll enjoy it.

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The bedside bookstack – August 2021

What’s teetering on the bedside bookstack this August.

Hamnet by Maggie O’Farrell, Tinder Press, 2020

This divine book is a new favourite for me. The premise is the death of Shakespeare’s son Hamnet but the offering is way beyond that. It’s also about his wife and parents, his other children and extended family. This is a story about the plague, loyalty, parents and children, old lore and knowledge.

As a reader you are fully immersed. To be honest, I didn’t want to come up for air. As a writer, I was looking for clues. How is she doing this? How is she spinning this story into such a wonder? It’s one of the few present tense narrations that never felt affected. The POV was always a perfect match for the character at hand. Shakespeare actually has the least air play of everyone and in this story, that’s as it should be. This one will be a re-read for me and a re-re-read no doubt. I want an in on the alchemy at play.

After you’d gone by Maggie O’Farrell, Review 2001

I picked this straight up after finishing Hamnet and it was interesting to go from her first novel to her most recent. In between there was 20 years and another eight or so books.

She was already doing interesting things in this book, confident and assured enough to toggle back and forth in time and also from first-person to third-person without the awkwardness you might expect.

This is Alice Raikes’ story but it is also that of her mother and grandmother. One day Alice steps out into traffic. She is left in a coma and it’s uncertain whether it was intention or accident. The story circles back to where it all began and we see how the tangled threads of family history can still trip us up years later. Maggie O’Farrell is sooo good at her job.

Pachinko by Min Jin Lee, Head of Zeus, 2017

This has been sitting on the bookstack since I started the bookstack. It’s a total tome at over 500 pages and whenever I looked at it, I thought ‘too hard’. But if you don’t read a book like that in lockdown then you never will.

And it isn’t too hard at all. It was completely absorbing and exactly what I didn’t know it needed. It’s an epic that follows four generations of a Korean family in Japan from 1932 to 1989. By the end of it, you know them all so intimately. You’ve seen people scrimp and survive and you’ve seen babies grow up and have their own babies. The family offers such rich detail and dynamics but alongside that is the history and context of Korea and Japan. For Koreans in Japan, language, culture, status and identity remain a negotiation for every generation. 

Last Night by Mhairi McFarlane, Harper Collins, 2021

I’d never heard of Scottish writer Mhairi (pronounced Vah-Ree) McFarlane before but am happy to know she’s got a good-sized back catalogue cos I just devoured this book (lying in bed after my 2nd Pfizer vaccine).

Eve, Susie, Justin and Ed have been friends since high school. A sudden accident changes everything and brings old secrets and deep loss with it. Whip-smart, of the times and somehow able to orchestrate grief and a good humour without diminishing either. One of those books where I often found myself thinking, ‘Yes! Yes, that’s exactly how it is!’.

I demand that it be turned into a smart British rom-com immediately!

Car Crash by Lech Blaine, Black Inc., 2021

When Lech Blaine was 17, he survived a car crash that killed three of his friends. This memoir is about grief and depression and the toxic masculinity that disallows young men to feel them. There has always been such honesty and eloquence to his journalism and he brings this to his memoir as well.

 Before the crash he was a product of his own expectations of what sort of man he should be; I was totally beholden to a holy trinity of influences: Christianity, masculinity and capitalism.

Masculinity still hasn’t evolved as this year’s string of revelations from parliamentarians to school boys has shown. Put this on some reading lists, make it a high school text and we can hope that maybe it might.

The Spill by Imbi Neeme, Penguin, 2020

Sisters Nicole and Samantha aren’t exactly what you’d call close. Their family split a long time ago with Nicole and their Mum, Tina, on one side and Samantha, their father and whoever his current wife is on the other. No one wants it to be this way or stays civil long enough for it to be any different.

When their mum dies from liver failure, it’s finally time for the sisters to get answers from each other and the past. Spanning the decades and a fair stretch of Western Australia’s coastline this one is also good as a home grown read. Sometimes you just need to read about a climate that’s familiar and places you recognise. 

Lucky’s by Alex Pippos, Picador 2020

This is a sprawling family saga that crosses continents and generations. During what he thinks were his best years, Lucky owned a franchise of cafes all over Australia. They were usually run by Greeks, like Lucky, but the décor and menu were intentionally American. But times change, families split up and as an old man, Lucky wants to get back some of what he’s lost over the years.

At the same time Emily comes to Sydney chasing the ghost of her father and a commission for the New Yorker. She thinks that Lucky has answers for her and he hopes that her interest could be a final chance to change his luck. Like Pachinko, this is another one where you’re with the family long enough to see babies have babies and witness how the migrant dream changes with the next generation.

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The bedside bookstack – February 2021

What I’m reading and what’s gathering dust on the bedside bookstack this month.

The Rain Heron by Robbie Arnott, Text Publishing, 2020

Loved this one. Just gobbled it up.

The word ‘fable’ gets used a lot to describe this book and for good reason. It’s not entirely here and not entirely now and not completely possible in our world but it’s still very familiar. The landscape especially is a mash-up of Tasmanian wilderness and the European continent.

Ren lives in a remote mountain area. She keeps to herself and has so far avoided the new martial law of the land. That changes when soldiers come looking for the Rain Heron. Most people think it’s just a story but Ren knows that it isn’t.

The narrative is divided between the past and present for Ren, the Army Captain looking for the Rain Heron and a medic in her team.

Sorrow and Bliss by Meg Mason, 4th Estate, 2020

Exactly as the title suggests, this one covers the best and worst of what life and our closest relationships have to offer.

Martha is our narrator. Her highs are high and her lows are totally debilitating. She knows there is something more to it but everyone around her says that’s just the way she is. This is a story about families, sisters, marriage and mental health.

Martha is funny and irritating and will keep you reading way past bedtime.  

Axiomatic by Maria Tumarkin, Brow Books 2018

I’m usually a one-book-at-a-time reader. I read all the short stories or essays in a collection in a row. But I had to put this collection down and let a little light in between the essays. They’re not comfortable reads – suicide, poverty, the failings of the justice system….

But that doesn’t mean that they shouldn’t be read. It’s a privilege to accompany Maria Tumarkin’s intellect and curiosity. She is a beautiful writer but isn’t writing about beautiful things in this book.

The Nowhere Child by Christian White, Affirm Press, 2018

It’s no surprise that Christian White was a scriptwriter before he was an author. This mystery unfolds in a very filmic way and is an easy read page-turner. The measure of a whodunnit is whether you’re interested enough to know and it’s clever enough to keep you guessing. Ticks on both fronts for this one.

Two-year-old Sammy Went disappears from her home in Kentucky. 30 years later, a man turns up in suburban Melbourne to tell Kim Leamy that he thinks she’s that girl. All the right rules have been followed in this one to set up a crime, a handful of possible suspects and then let it ride.

The Morbids by Ewa Ramsey, Allen & Unwin, 2020

This is a book about besties and PTSD.

After surviving a car accident, Caitlin thinks that she’s going to die. All the time and in countless different ways. A fair chunk of normal life is out of bounds because of her anxieties.

Caitlin tries to keep a lid on the narratives that play out internally and this means distancing herself from her best friend and family. She goes to group sessions with other people who are also convinced they’re going to die. None of them are sure it’s doing any good but misery loves company.

Did I mention that it’s also a love story? What can I say – I’m a sucker for a happy ending.

We Were Never Friends by Margaret Bearman, Brio Books, 2020

Lotti Coates has just moved to Canberra and is trying to navigate new friendships and puberty outside of the shadow of her famous artist father.

I loved how domestic this story was. The mum is always arriving home with the youngest child after day care pick-up and dinners always need to be made.

Unfortunately, the artist father was so annoying to me that instead of following on with the plotline I was a chapter back, still fuming about how arrogant and selfish he was. I was, perhaps disproportionately, distracted by how much air-play we give to selfish men who are apparently ‘genius’ and can therefore absent themselves from any childminding, meal preparations and other domestic necessities.

Redhead by the Side of the Road by Anne Tyler, Chatto and Windus, 2020

Anne Tyler has 22 novels behind her (I know, right!!!!) and plenty of people who say she is a genius but this book just wasn’t for me. I gave it a good 45 pages and then left it.

There is a type of story where your main character is pretty boring and regimented person. Their daily routine is described in detail, which is also pretty boring and then eventually (the hope is) something happens or they meet someone that changes their life and their ways.

I just couldn’t wait around long enough for that to happen.

Pachinko by Min Jin Lee, Head of Zeus, 2017

Still in the pile. Still haven’t started it yet. Next month I say.

This tome was my only Christmas book (and it actually arrived in January). Anything over 500 pages seems to sink further down the book stack for sheer stability of the pile.

Billed as a generational family saga about Koreans in Japan, I missed the hype of this book when it came out but put it on my wish list after listening to this interview with Min Jin Lee on Conversations.

Sounds like once I get stuck in, I won’t be coming up for air for a while.

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