Read Readings Monthly, March 2015 here

Transcription

MARCH 2015
FREE
BOOKS
MUSIC
FILM
E V E N TS
BAD BEHAVIOUR
Rebecca Starford discusses her memoir
of bullying and boarding school with
Martin Shaw
page 7
FRESH AUSTRALIAN
FICTION
Bronte Coates introduces new
local literary talent
page 8
NEW IN MARCH
S.J. FINN
$24.95
KARL OVE
KNAUSGAARD
HANNIE
RAYSON
ADVANCED
STYLE
JOSÉ
GONZÁLEZ
page 10
$27.99
$24.99
$19.95
$21.95
page 10
page 15
page 21
page 22
An elegant, immersive account of
young woman’s exploration of her
family history—and the search that
takes her from the Nazi Occupation
in World War II to love and a new life
in France.
The much anticipated collection of
stories from Kelly Link. Like Kafka
hosting Saturday Night Live, Link
mixes humour with existential dread.
‘The most darkly playful voice in
American fiction.’ Michael Chabon
Forensic psychiatrist Natalie King
works with victims and perpetrators
of violent crime—including abused
women and women who kill their
children. Now she’s is being stalked.
Author Anne Buist is a leading
perinatal psychiatrist.
From the author of international
bestseller Before I Go to Sleep.
When Julia learns her sister has
been killed she gets involved with a
stranger online, hoping to expose the
truth. Is she risking everything?
Introduced by Nicolas Rothwell
’Antonia Murphy is a writer of great
charm and appeal.’ Elizabeth Gilbert
Southwest Britain, AD 43.
On the eve of the Roman invasion, a
young woman rises to power.
A mesmerising Australian debut
about the collision of two worlds: an
ancient indigenous culture against a
modern, warring force.
A fascinating investigation of the
myths surrounding our conception of
immunity, and its implications for the
individual and society.
‘[Biss] brings a sober, erudite
and humane voice to an often
overheated debate.’ New Yorker
A memoir in parts, from one of
Australia’s best-loved playwrights.
Hello, Beautiful! captures a life
behind the scenes—tender moments,
hilarious encounters and,
inevitably, drama.
‘So beautifully written, so funny.’
David Williamson
Ages
13+
$12.95
A gripping tale of wartime Sydney.
Reporter Lloyd Fitzherbert is called
to a ‘last-minute job’: a beautiful
woman is dead in the harbour. And
Fitzherbert knows more than he’s
letting on.
Ever dreamed of a tree change?
Part family drama, part cultural
study and part cautionary tale,
Dirty Chick will leave you laughing,
cringing and rooting for its
unconventional heroine.
The story of a young girl whose
longing for love and capacity for
forgiveness transforms the damaged
people around her.
The war between Cityside and
Southside escalates when a killer
virus—Havoc—is unleashed amid
secrecy, lies and betrayal.
‘Vann’s novels are striking,
uncompromising portraits of
American life; here is another
exceptional example.’ Kirkus Reviews
A thrilling, thought-provoking
novel from the author of the
Text Prize-winning The Bridge.
Since the 1980s Perth has been
synonymous with wealth. But what
happens when the boom ends?
An incisive look at what Western
Australia’s future may hold.
Contributors include Tim Winton,
Brooke Davis, Shaun Tan.
R E A D I N G S M O N T H LY M A R C H 2 0 1 5
3
News
CHILDREN’S BOOK FESTIVAL
The big day out for little readers is back!
Head to the lawn of the State Library
of Victoria on Sunday 22 March from
10am–4pm for this year’s Children’s Book
Festival. Pop by the Monster Marquee to
make your own horns, and then wear them
throughout the day while you explore
the picnic library or create a giant book
that you can take home as a memento.
Readings will be all hands on deck
selling lots of great books and looking
after signings by your favourite writers
and illustrators, including Shaun Tan,
Hazel Edwards, Terry Denton and Andy
Griffiths. The Festival is free and everyone
is welcome. Come down and join us for
the book party!
THE READINGS CHILDREN’S
BOOK PRIZE
Readings Monthly
Free independent monthly newspaper
published by Readings Books, Music & Film
The Readings Children’s Book Prize,
established in 2014, recognises and
celebrates books that families love reading
together, or that children read under the
covers with a torch late into the night
because they can’t bear to put them down.
The Prize seeks to support an Australian
author – one who has published no more
than four children’s books – in establishing
their position as a valued contributor to
children’s literature. The winner will be
announced at a special event at Readings
Hawthorn in July, and will be awarded a
prize of $4,000. Please visit readings.com.au/
the-readings-children-s-book-prize for more
details, including the full eligibility criteria.
Author Sally Rippin will announce the 2015
shortlist at the Children’s Book Festival at
11.10am on Sunday 22 March at the State
Library of Victoria.
INSPIRATION BY DESIGN: WORD
& IMAGE FROM THE VICTORIA &
ALBERT MUSEUM, LONDON
Editor
Elke Power
[email protected]
Premiering at the State Library of Victoria
and running from 20 March–14 June,
this free exhibition showcases some
of the world’s finest book art, graphics
and illustration. Organised by London’s
Editorial Assistant
Alan Vaarwerk
[email protected]
Advertising
acclaimed Victoria & Albert Museum,
Inspiration by Design celebrates 150 years
of collecting by the National Art Library.
Immerse yourself in beautiful books, from
historic illustrated manuscripts and rare
artists’ books to modern graphic design
and fashion photography. Don’t miss this
exciting international exhibition of graphic
art and design from across the ages. Our
shop at the State Library will stock a wide
range of gorgeous books and gift ideas from
the Victoria & Albert Museum to coincide
with the exhibition.
THE 2015 STELLA PRIZE
LONGLIST
The Stella Prize longlist for 2015 has been
announced. Celebrating the contribution
of Australian women to literature, the
$50,000 prize was awarded for the first
time in 2013 to Carrie Tiffany for Mateship
with Birds, and last year to Clare Wright
for The Forgotten Rebels of Eureka. The
2015 Stella Prize longlist is: Foreign Soil,
Maxine Beneba Clarke; The Strays, Emily
Bitto; Only the Animals, Ceridwen Dovey;
This House of Grief, Helen Garner; Golden
Boys, Sonya Hartnett; The Invisible History
of the Human Race, Christine Kenneally;
The Eye of the Sheep, Sofie Laguna; The
Golden Age, Joan London; Laurinda, Alice
Pung; Nest, Inga Simpson; Heat and Light,
Ellen van Neerven; and In My Mother’s
Hands, Biff Ward. The 2015 Stella Prize
shortlist will be announced at noon on
Thursday 12 March, and the Prize itself
will be awarded in Melbourne on the
evening of Tuesday 21 April.
offer is only valid from 9am–midnight
Thursday 5 March, applies to in-stock
items only and is not valid with any other
offer or discount.
ALLIANCE FRANÇAISE FRENCH
FILM FESTIVAL
Now in its 26th year, the Alliance Française
French Film Festival is set to resume its
love affair with audiences once again.
Running from 4–22 March, the festival will
screen an enchanting selection of the finest
movies to emerge from France over the
last 12 months. Readings is proud to be a
sponsor of the Melbourne festival for 2015.
For more information and to book tickets,
please visit affrenchfilmfestival.org
READINGS’ 46TH BIRTHDAY
It’s Readings’ 46th birthday on Thursday 5
March! To celebrate, we are offering 10% off
all full-priced books in all shops and online
on this day only. To receive your discount
in our shops just say ‘Happy Birthday
Readings’ at the counter. If you are shopping
online, simply visit readings.com.au and
type ‘BIRTHDAY’ in the promotional code
section at check-out. Please note that this
Stella Charls
[email protected]
(03) 9341 7739
Graphic Design
Cat Matteson
[email protected]
Front Cover
Readings Monthly cover design by Cat
Matteson with images from the cover of Bad
Behaviour by Rebecca Starford, courtesy of
Allen & Unwin. Bad Behaviour cover design by
Sandy Cull, gogoGingko (cover photo: Getty
Images and Sandy Cull).
Cartoon
Oslo Davis
oslodavis.com
Readings donates 10% of its profits each
year to The Readings Foundation:
readings.com.au/the-readings-foundation
Antony Hamilton
Paula Lay
& Alisdair Macindoe
Phillip Adams
Atlanta Eke
BalletLab
Chunky Move
Prue Lang
Force Majeure
Rawcus
Lucy Guerin Inc
Rebecca Jensen
& Sarah Aiken
Melanie Lane
Natalie Abbott
readings_ad.indd 1
Rosalind Crisp /
Omeo Dance
Dance Massive brings you
19 contemporary dance
works over 13 days
Shelley Lasica
St Martins
Sue Healey
Tim Darbyshire
Vicki Van Hout
Victoria Chiu
10-22 March 2015
dancemassive.com.au
#dancemassive15
16/02/2015 12:34 pm
4
March Events
5
LAUNCH OF DR
DEB ANDERSON’S
ENDURANCE
12
MARK LATHAM
AT LARGE
Join us for the launch of Endurance by Dr
Deb Anderson from the School of Media,
Film and Journalism at Monash University.
Endurance presents stories of ordinary
Australians grappling with extraordinary
circumstances, providing insight into
their lives, experiences of drought and
perceptions of climate change.
Mark Latham is, by his own admission, the
most outspoken, uncontrollable former leader
in Labor Party history. Latham at Large is a
collection of his brilliantly written opinion
pieces scrutinising the Australian political
landscape, critiquing the modern media and
also detailing other interests, such as his
fascination with horse racing. This is going to
be a fun night!
Free, no booking required
Thursday 5 March, 6.30pm
Readings Carlton
Free, but please book at readings.com.au/events
Thursday 12 March, 6pm
Readings Hawthorn
5
MICHELE GIERCK
IN CONVERSATION
WITH MORAG
FRASER
Michelle Gierck and Morag Fraser discuss
Fraying: Mum, Memory Loss, the Medical
Maze, and Me, which chronicles a mother
and daughter’s compelling journey through
memory loss and the medical establishment.
Michele Gierck found herself thrust into
the role of primary carer with no map to
navigate the world of aged care and medical
bureaucracy.
Readings Hawthorn
11
KATE WHITE ON
WOMEN IN
SCIENCE
Kate White’s Keeping Women in Science
discusses the issues of women scientists being
under-represented in leadership roles and
leaving the profession in greater proportions
than men. In acknowledgement of
International Women’s Day, Kate will discuss
the challenges that women in science face.
12
KATE HOLDEN
LAUNCHES
S.J. FINN’S
DOWN TO THE
RIVER
Kate Holden will launch S.J. Finn’s new
novel Down To The River, a compelling and
thoughtful portrait of a small town rocked
by disturbing allegations. See our review on
page 10 for more about the book.
16
HANNIE RAYSON
IN CONVERSATION
WITH AMY VULETA
Russell Marks will discuss his new book
Crime & Punishment, inspired by his
observations and experiences of Victorian
courts over two years. In 2013, taxpayers
spent over $14 billion on police, courts and
corrective services. At a time of budgetary
crisis, how is this money being used and
how do we know the system works?
Monday 16 March, 6.30pm
Readings St Kilda
Tuesday 17 March, 6.30pm
Readings Carlton
16
LAUNCH OF THE
LATEST BOOK IN
ELLIE MARNEY’S
‘EVERY’ YA SERIES
Join us for the launch of Ellie Marney’s new
Young Adult thriller Every Move, the latest
instalment in the popular Every series.
Readings Carlton
Readings Carlton
Join us for the launch of Charles Hall’s
novel, Summer’s Gone. Devastatingly honest,
it revisits a steamy and complicated ‘summer
of love’, years after its tragic end. This event
will also feature music by Dan Hall.
Wednesday 11 March, 6.30pm
Readings Carlton
Join us for the launch of the new short story
anthology Breaking Beauty, edited by Lynette
Washington and featuring 27 established
and emerging writers as they put one of the
greatest obsessions of our time under the
spotlight and show that there is no light
without darkness.
Readings Carlton
17
STEPHAN PASTIS
TALKS TIMMY
FAILURE
Free, but please book at
readings.com.au/events
Readings Hawthorn
CHARLES HALL’S
SUMMER’S GONE
SHORT STORY
ANTHOLOGY
LAUNCH:
BREAKING BEAUTY
Stephan Pastis took an unusual route to
becoming a number-one best-selling comic
creator: he went to law school before
creating Timmy Failure – the clueless, risibly
self-confident CEO of the best detective
agency in town, perhaps even the nation.
Join us to meet Stephan, get your collection
of Timmy Failure books signed and be
inspired to create your very own hero.
Wednesday 11 March, 6pm
Readings Hawthorn
11
18
HISTORICAL
FICTION LAUNCH:
ILKA TAMPKE’S SKIN
Join us for the launch of Ilka Tampke’s Skin,
a mesmerising new novel set in Celtic
Britain on the cusp of Roman invasion. See
our review on page 9 for more about the
book.
16
RUSSELL MARKS
ON CRIME &
PUNISHMENT
Hannie Rayson has spent a lifetime giving
voice to others in the many roles she has
written for stage and television. In her new
memoir, Hello, Beautiful!, she shines the
spotlight on herself. Hear Hannie share
stories from her life behind the scenes with
the great warmth and humour that has made
her one of our best-known playwrights.
Free, but please book at
St Kilda Bowling Club, 66 Fitzroy St, St Kilda
12
17
THE UNDERWATER
FANCY-DRESS
PARADE
In celebration of the beautiful new picture
book, The Underwater Fancy-Dress Parade,
join the author, Davina Bell, and illustrator,
Allison Colpoys, as they take you on a funfilled, underwater-themed adventure with
activities suitable for 3–7-year-olds. For
more information about the book, see our
review on page 19.
Entry is $25 per child and includes
a copy of the book and wonderful
‘underwater’ activities. Please book
at readings.com.au/events
Readings Hawthorn
17
ABIGAIL ULMAN
ON HOT LITTLE
HANDS
Abigail Ulman’s Hot Little Hands contains
nine funny, confronting and pitch-perfect
stories about desire, identity and stumbling
on the fringes of innocence. Ulman’s work has
appeared in New England Review, Meanjin
and New Australian Stories, among other
publications. We are delighted that she'll be
joining us to share her writing process and
discuss her book.
Tuesday 17 March, 6pm
Readings Hawthorn
18
GEOFFREY
BLAINEY ON THE
STORY OF
AUSTRALIA’S
PEOPLE
Come and hear historian Professor Blainey
discusses his latest work, The Story of
Australia's People: Volume I. This is the
first part of an ambitious and exciting twovolume work on Australia's history from its
origins to the present day. This first volume
covers ancient times to the Gold Rush.
Wednesday 18 March, 6pm
Readings Hawthorn
19
FIRST THINGS
FIRST WITH KATE
LLEWELLYN
Join one of Australia’s most-loved authors,
Kate Llewellyn, for a discussion of her latest
book, First Things First, a collection of letters
from her private correspondence with artists
and writers. The collection, edited by Ruth
Bacchus and Barbara Hill, brims with energy,
humour and insights into a writer’s life.
Free, but please book on 9658 9998
Library at the Dock
107 Victoria Harbour Promenade, Docklands
For more information and updates, please visit the events page at readings.com.au/events. Please note bookings do not necessarily guarantee a seat and some events may be standing room only.
26
NICK EARLS ON
NEW BOY
Nick Earls has written 20 novels inclusing
best-sellers Zigzag Street, Bachelor Kisses,
Perfect Skin and World of Chickens. Join
us as he discusses New Boy, his new book
for young readers (10 and up), which
tells the story of Herschelle, who has
moved to Australia from South Africa.
Coming up:
dates for your diary
Readings Hawthorn
19
HELENA & VIKKI
MOURSELLAS IN
CONVERSATION
WITH CHRIS
GORDON
Helena and Vikki Moursellas are the
young Greek cooks who won the hearts
of the nation as 2014 finalists on Channel
7’s My Kitchen Rules. But we love them
because their food is brilliant, easy and
full of heart. Join Readings’ Chris Gordon
as she chats with these local sisters about
cooking, sharing and being in the limelight.
Read more about the book on page 17.
Readings Carlton
19
BAD BEHAVIOUR:
REBECCA
STARFORD IN
CONVERSATION
WITH ELKE
POWER
Rebecca Starford’s debut memoir, Bad
Behaviour, is an astonishingly forthright
examination of bullying, friendships
and responsibilities. Join us for a lively
discussion about identity, growing up,
writing, and being heard. Don't miss Martin
Shaw's interview with Rebecca on page 7
and our review of Bad Behaviour on page 15.
Readings Hawthorn
14
April
26
KILL YOUR
DARLINGS FIRST
BOOK CLUB
We are delighted to be hosting the monthly
Kill Your Darlings First Book Club event
series in 2015! The March First Book Club
author is Erin Gough, whose Ampersand
Project-winning YA novel The Flywheel is ‘a
tender-true story of girl meets girl, falling
in love and finding your feet’. Erin will be in
conversation with Kill Your Darlings’ online
editor Veronica Sullivan. Drinks provided.
31
MARNI CORDELL
LAUNCHES TOM
DOIG’S THE COAL
FACE
Readings Carlton
25
When Kate Grenville’s mother
died she left behind many fragments of
memoir. These were the starting point for
One Life, the story of a woman whose life
spanned a century of tumult and change.
One of Australia’s finest writers, Grenville
will join us to speak about her new work,
a deeply moving homage to and intimate
account of her mother’s life.
Entry is $30 per person and includes a signed
first edition of One Life. Limited seating
available, please book at readings.com.au/events
Tuesday 14 April, 6.30pm
Readings Hawthorn
Free, but please RSVP to
[email protected]
Readings Carlton
Join us as Marni Cordell, editor of Crikey,
launches Tom Doig’s new book The Coal Face
which examines the causes, reactions and
impact of the 2014 Morwell coalmine fire.
JAMES BRADLEY
ON CLADE
KATE GRENVILLE
ON ONE LIFE
31
TONY WILSON
LAUNCHES
GABRIELLE
WILLIAMS’ THE
GUY, THE GIRL, THE
ARTIST & HIS EX
Award-winning novelist, poet and critic
James Bradley will discuss his critically
acclaimed new novel, Clade. This novel
spans the years from 2016 to beyond 2057,
and has a subtle dig at all elements of society
and what we are doing to our world. For
more information about Clade, see the
review on page 7 of our February issue, or
online at readings.com.au.
Tony Wilson will launch Gabrielle
Williams’ new novel The Guy, The Girl,
The Artist and His Ex, a fresh take on the
notorious theft of Picasso’s Weeping Woman
from the National Gallery of Victoria.
Readings Carlton
Tuesday 31 March, 6pm
Readings Hawthorn
20
April
RIVER COTTAGE
AT HAWTHORN
Paul West is a television
presenter, farmer, self-sufficiency activist,
chef, and along with Hugh FearnleyWhittingstall, one of the stars of River
Cottage Australia. Join us for an exclusive
evening as Paul discusses the new River
Cottage Australia cookbook and shares his
tales from the dirt, stories of friendship and,
of course, his favourite recipes.
Tickets are $100 per person and include a
two-course meal, wine, and signed first edition
of River Cottage Australia. Please book at
Monday 20 April, 6.30pm
Crabapple Kitchen
659 Glenferrie Rd, Hawthorn
5
6
Mark’s
Say
News and views from Readings’ Managing Director,
Mark Rubbo
I’ve just attended American Booksellers
Association’s Winter Institute. For four
days, independent booksellers and authors
gather together to discuss books and the
state of the industry. Now in its tenth
year, the Institute was held in the small,
pretty city of Asheville, North Carolina.
Surrounded by the Blue Ridge Mountains,
Asheville was a very considered choice
by the ABA; in the mid-20th century
Asheville’s downtown area had been
decimated by the construction of malls
on the city’s outskirts, which had sucked
the lifeblood out of the city centre. With
the help of some enlightened developers
and town councillors, the city has been
undergoing a successful rejuvenation
process. An integral part of that process
was the town’s bookshop, Malaprop’s,
which had been started in the run down
downtown area in 1982 by Hungarianborn Emöke B’Racz – ‘You could walk
three blocks in either direction to find
another building that was occupied’. In
1997 she was approached by one of the
developers who wanted to buy a large
abandoned building a few doors from
Malaprop’s; he would only buy the
building if Emöke would move her store
into it. It was a risk for the developer
and for Emöke, but they pulled it off
and Malaprop’s became a key factor in
the revitalisation of the downtown area,
their success encouraging sympathetic
businesses to take the risk also.
Today Asheville is a vibrant and
delightful little city full of interesting local
businesses supported by an engaged and
committed community. It’s no surprise,
then, that Ashevillle is at the forefront
of the growing Buy Local movement in
the United States; studies have shown
that locally owned businesses contribute
much more to local economies in terms
of jobs, taxes and in intangible benefits
than do the large national brands, and
certainly in Asheville the community
has embraced the idea with businesses
such as Malaprops thriving in spite of
the online competition from the likes of
Amazon. Indeed, the mood among the
600 or so booksellers at the Institute was
buoyantly optimistic, with booksellers
reporting growing sales and community
support. The American public, it seems,
have decided that local independent
bookshops are an important asset for
their communities, and that without their
support they will lose them.
Hundreds of authors also came to
the Winter Institute to pitch their new
books to the booksellers. Authors and
publishers alike are acknowledging how
important the independent booksellers
are in reaching readers. In what was
like a giant speed-dating exercise where
authors got a chance to meet booksellers
and spruik their books to them. I’d like to
share a few titles that caught my interest.
Steven Johnson, the author of How We
Got to Now – Six Innovations That Made
the Modern World (Penguin, $32.99)
gave the opening address. In his book he
traces six key technologies that changed
the world – refrigeration, clocks, lenses,
water purification, recorded sound and
artificial light. He was fascinating. I
met photographer Sally Mann, who was
signing advance copies of her memoir
Hold Still (Little, Brown, $67.95, May) –
endorsed by Patti Smith, this looks
fascinating. Historian Erik Larson wrote
In the Garden of Beasts a few years ago;
his new book Dead Wake (Scribe, $35,
May) is about the sinking of the passenger
liner Lusitania in 1915 on its way from
New York to Liverpool. I was enchanted
by Mary Norris, who’s been a copy editor
at the New Yorker for over 30 years. Her
book on grammar, Between You & Me –
Confessions of a Comma Queen is due out
from Text ($29.99) in April. I had a brief
chat with T.C. Boyle, whose novel The
Harder They Come, about three damaged
characters from California, is due later
this year. Debut novel City on Fire by
Garth Risk Hallberg is set in New York in
the 1970s. At 900 pages, it looks daunting
but very enticing – the ‘70s was such an
interesting period in the life of that city.
It’s due in October.
Historic Grove Park Inn, Asheville, North Carolina, site of The Winter Institute
From
the
Books
Desk
Martin Shaw,
Readings Books Division Manager
I must say I’ve been having a good run
of late with the first book I read in any
given year. Last year, for instance, I was
gushing about Maxine Beneba Clarke’s
Foreign Soil – so it’s been gratifying to see
the reception it’s had since, including most
recently her Stella Prize longlisting.
This year it’s a memoir that’s totally
seduced me: Rebecca Starford’s Bad
Behaviour: A Memoir of Bullying and
Boarding School. Starford is already highly
regarded on the Australian literary scene:
she co-founded the Kill Your Darlings
literary journal, and is an editor at Text
Publishing – but I had never expected
a tale quite so compelling and affecting
as this one. It looks back at the year
Starford spent in her schooldays at the
bush campus of a well-known school in
the Victorian Alps – partly with fondness
for the encounter with nature it afforded,
but overwhelmingly with horror at the
various forms of bullying and aggression
that went on between the 14-year-old girls,
under minimal staff supervision. There
is grief and guilt over her own behaviour,
but Starford also finds a key here to how
some of her later adult relationships were
sabotaged by the feelings of isolation – and
the craving for love and acceptance –
that so marked that year. Her memories
spurred by a return visit to the school, Bad
Behaviour soon has you in its grip (as our
review attests), but it’s also beautifully
told, with moments of particular lyricism,
and structured too with particular finesse
(another strand of the book is an account
of her life thereafter, focusing on her
coming out in her late teens and all the
highs and lows that entailed).
This was by no means easy material
for Starford to grapple with, but her desire
for truth and self-knowledge burns strong,
and the result is an extraordinary debut.
There was so much to talk about when I
interviewed Starford recently about the
book – you’ll find an edited version of our
Q&A opposite (page 7).
Turning to the rest of the month’s
releases now, and it’s clear that Kazuo
Ishiguro’s first book in ten years is a
big deal. The Buried Giant seems to be
dividing early readers, in that it doesn’t
appear to have a natural affinity with some
of his earlier, immensely popular novels,
but I think that’s a good thing: here’s an
author attempting to plough new ground.
Here he takes us to Dark Age Britain –
with dragons, ogres, giants, and an elderly
Sir Gawain – and a mystical take on the
meaning of life.
Readers of this column will be
accustomed to hear me raving about each
successive Karl Ove Knausgaard volume,
and readers with the first three volumes
behind them will need little spurring to
embark on his fourth, Dancing in the Dark.
Our reviewer Gerard Elson is spot-on
when he says: ‘(Knausgaard is) relentless
in airing his most honest, and therefore
often least admirable, self. I think it’s
precisely this that makes My Struggle such
a generous, dealienating and necessary
endeavour’.
I do love the look of Catherine Lacey’s
debut Nobody is Ever Missing as well –
and not just because it’s set in my home
country of New Zealand!
In terms of Australian fiction, it’s
a rich month, with strong debuts from
Robyn Cadwallader, Alice Robinson, Ilka
Tampke & Abigail Ulman. There is also
a second novel from S.J. Finn, whose
theme of paedophilia, our reviewer notes,
makes it ‘an incredibly uncomfortable
book to read, but good fiction should be
challenging and thankfully there are still
small publishers willing to take risks and
bring important books like this to light’.
We were also rather taken by a new book
from Amanda Lohrey, A Short History of
Richard Kline.
Finally, the world was stunned back
in 2011 by the actions of Norwegian
fanaticist Anders Breivek, who planted
a bomb outside the Norwegian PM’s
office before travelling to the island of
Utoya and massacring scores of children.
One of Us by Anne Seierstad is a chilling
investigation into a childhood scarred
early, and Breivik’s increasing obsession
with extreme right wing views.
Bad
Behaviour
7
Martin Shaw in conversation with Rebecca Starford
Martin Shaw,
Readings Books Division Manager
R
ebecca Starford’s Bad Behaviour: A Memoir
of Bullying and Boarding School is generating
much excitement at Readings. After
numerous sleep-deprived staff members
turned up to work unable to think or speak of anything
else, Martin Shaw decided to go straight to the source
for the story behind this fantastic debut. Here, Martin
and Rebecca discuss how this extraordinary memoir
came about.
MS: I’d have to confess that I was a little stunned when
I heard that this book had been signed a couple of years
ago. How will she find the time, I wondered, between being
a full-time editor (you’re now at Text Publishing) and
running the esteemed literary journal Kill Your Darlings
(that you co-founded) – and writing a book on top of that?!
How did you first come to think of writing this book?
RS: I first thought about writing about my experiences
at boarding school about five years ago. I’d just come out of
an intense and pretty dysfunctional relationship, and I was
very unhappy. I just couldn’t pull myself out of this slump –
I found I was thinking about myself a lot, but not being very
introspective, or thoughtful towards other people.
I finally rustled up the courage to see a therapist, which
was a transformative experience. During these sessions, I
started talking about old friends I hadn’t thought about in
a long time, and then I found myself often thinking about
‘Silver Creek’ – drawing comparisons to the friendships I’d
had there, as a teenager, to the relationship I’d just come
out of.
But I didn’t think of writing a book – not at first,
anyway. I planned to write an essay; an essay seemed
far more contained, and less daunting than a full-length
manuscript. I’d had a bit of experience writing essays, but
mostly I’d been writing reviews and literary criticism – as
far away from life writing, I think, as you can get!
A friend had recommended I read Odd Girl Out
by Rachel Simmons, a young American writer and
academic. This was a fascinating book, which profiled
dozens of teenage girls across various social milieus,
and demonstrated how endemic aggression (emotional,
psychological and at times physical) is to female friendship
– and how often the aggressor is also the best and most
loved friend.
Reading this book really kick-started my book-writing
plans. Eventually I realised that I had far more material
than I could squeeze into an essay – and that my interests
and motivations in writing the book had in fact changed:
I wanted to dig deeper into my own experiences, to reexamine what happened during that year away, and how
much of an effect it had on me into adulthood.
MS: I loved the way you addressed the issue of writing
about people you knew, and may still know, already in
the opening paragraph of the book, interrogating the
impulse and addressing any potential qualms the reader
may have. Even though a preliminary note informs us
that ‘names have been changed, attributes adjusted &
characters conflated’, you seem to flag both a freedom
and a responsibility in your method. How did you find the
experience of writing about people so clearly drawn from
life? Did the necessity of protecting identities, especially
when writing about disturbing episodes of bullying when
you were at school, or private moments in your adult
relationships, inadvertently provide opportunities for you
to shape the narrative while still remaining true to the
essence of events?
RS: It’s a tricky question because all storytelling is
contrived, to an extent, isn’t it? But writing about real-life
people does bring with it such complex ethical questions.
And while I did eventually change characters’ names to
protect their identity, and the identity of the school, I must
confess that I didn’t really ask myself any of these moral
questions as I was writing. Not out of any callousness, but
because I think if I did, I would have found the writing
excruciating – all that second-guessing. One of the great
challenges writing this memoir was to step outside of
myself – to almost become a character that wasn’t me at all,
to create a greater degree of reflection and objectivity. Once
I’d done this, however, I felt really liberated. That’s why I
found the earlier sections, when I was a teenager, far easier
to write – because I had that distance of time separating us.
MS: A key to the book – the thing without which you
probably couldn’t have undertaken the project – is the
existence of your diary from that time as a 14 year old
school student. But of course it’s not what’s mentioned
in it that became the thing that intrigued or bothered you
the most, but that ‘so many things had been left out entirely
– arguments, sadness, misbehaviour. On these pages I’d
instead pasted in photographs from hikes, to make it look
like something else had happened. What, I wondered, was I
trying to forget?’ How useful was having your diary to refer
back to, and what do you think are the limits of drawing
upon the writings of your 14-year-old self?
RS: I think it would have been very difficult to write
this book without my diary. It was my lifeline during the
early drafts – for so many reasons. It helped me recall
certain events that I had completely forgotten, it gave me
insight into my thoughts and concerns and preoccupations
throughout the year, and it helped me ‘plot’ out the
narrative, because all the key events of the memoir are
there, in its pages.
But what I found limiting about my diary also became
one of my most intriguing questions, which is teased out
in the book: what was I trying to forget? And, as it turned
out, it was many of the instances of bullying that took
place up in the boarding house – which I obviously didn’t
forget about because I’ve shaped a memoir around it! But
it was weirdly confronting and uncomfortable reading that
diary for the first time in more than ten years and realising
that within it I was trying, in a pretty unsophisticated
yet strategic way, to re-write my own history, my own
memories, with a misguided belief I might be able to trick
myself into forgetting certain episodes years later.
MS: If one was to name a general tone of the book it
might be, to a great extent, a self-castigatory one, and the
journey of the book seems to seek some explanation of that
pivotal year, and to achieve some sort of peace with the
past. But you don’t spare either the people around you at
the time or yourself. Would it have been a betrayal of your
Rebecca Starford. Photo courtesy of Elinor Griffith
intent if you had been more sparing?
RS: I imagine it must be very hard to be written about
by someone else. Most often when we talk about these
ethical issues, we talk about it from the perspective of the
writer, and we try to be very libertarian about it. But I guess
if the shoe was on the other foot, it would probably be very
different.
If someone from my boarding house had written about
this year, and I featured as a character, I would feel very
uncomfortable, but only because of the fear about how
these events might be represented: I would have absolutely
no control over the storytelling.
So I was very aware of that ‘powerlessness’, if you like,
of the real-life people I have written about. And although
I have attributed to them dialogue, and gestures, and
mannerisms, they are also rendered silent. They can’t
reply; they can’t protest; they can’t say, ‘That’s not how it
happened.’ (Unless, of course, they write a book too). In
some ways, that is the most thorny issue to grapple with –
they’re already at a disadvantage, and we’re all conditioned
to think that this isn’t fair.
Joan Didion says all writers are ruthless. But I’m not
sure: that seems to imply that a writer has no compassion
or pity for other people; people who become the subjects
of their books. I may have not censored the episodes from
that year, but I always tried to be honest and compassionate
and feeling towards the characters; they are only girls,
after all, and like me they will have changed as adults, and
perhaps even carried around similar feelings to those I did.
My portrait of my mother, particularly, is drawn out of love,
and also heartbreak.
To read the rest of this interview, visit readings.com.au/news
To read our review of Bad Behaviour, see page 15.
To hear more from Rebecca in person, see our event details on
page 5.
8
Fresh voices in
Australian fiction
Bronte Coates introduces new local literary talent
Bronte Coates,
The Readings Prize Manager
F
or a long time I used to think
it was simple to talk about
Australian fiction – to identify
prevalent themes like mateship,
struggling seaside towns or the gothic of
the bush and outback. Even though I read,
and loved, plenty of notable books outside
of this bubble (such as Helen Garner’s
Monkey Grip, Dorothy Porter’s The
Monkey’s Mask and Melissa Lucashenko’s
Steam Pigs), the idea of what constituted
‘Australian’ literature felt fixed. But over
the last few years, I feel there’s been
a definite shift in the way Australian
literature is considered not just within the
book industry, but also by readers in the
Australian community more widely.
We can probably attribute part of this
shift to the evolution of literary judges’
ideas about the nature, qualities and scope
of Australian literature. The potential
for prizes to instigate debate, as well as
influence the commercial success of books,
should not be undervalued. In 2011, the
shortlist for the Miles Franklin Award
featured just three titles, all by men, two of
whom were previous winners of the award.
The judges’ assertion that the ‘Australian
voice’ set these three books apart was
met with criticism. At the same time, the
discussion around the creation of the Stella
Prize was heating up, as booklovers argued
about why particular kinds of stories were
being valued over others.
As a judge for The Readings Prize
last year, it was exciting to read so many
varied books. The 2014 shortlist featured
Australian voices of all kinds, from the
fast-paced and frenetic monologues of Luke
Carman to the elegant and assured prose
of Fiona McFarlane. And this month sees
the release of six more Australian fiction
debuts – all reviewed here.
Patrick Lenton’s ‘unashamedly fun’
short-story collection, A Man Made Entirely
of Bats¸ features a man bitten by a jerk who
gains the exponential strength of ten jerks.
Compare this to the characters in Abigail
Ulman’s short-story collection, Hot Little
Hands – all young women coming to terms
with what it means to desire, and be desired,
or Ailia of Ilka Tampke’s Skin, who is born
without ‘skin’ and so faces an uncertain
future in society. In The Anchoress, Robyn
Cadwallader’s Sarah attempts to eschew
all connections to people, even as Ted of
Kári Gíslason’s The Ash Burner yearns
for them. Alice Robinson’s Anchor Point
is a quintessential Australian novel, ‘an
homage to the Australian landscape and its
excesses of flood and fire’, but it stands out
for the quality of Robinson’s ‘lyrical and
seamless’ writing.
As we move on it will, hopefully, be
less simple to talk about what constitutes
Australian literature. And I, for one, will be
very grateful.
Bronte Coates is the digital content
coordinator for Readings, manager of The
Readings Prize, and grants officer for The
Readings Foundation. Bronte was a judge for
The Readings Prize in 2014.
Novels
ANCHOR POINT
THE ASH BURNER
Alice Robinson
Kári Gíslason
Affirm Press. PB. $24.99
UQP. PB. $29.95
Anchor Point is a promising debut novel because of
the quality of its young author’s writing. Alice
Robinson is a local creative writing teacher, and her writing
is lyrical and seamless. The story is set in the Australian
bush and narrated by Laura who is 10 years old when we
first meet her in 1978. Her father, Bruce, works on the land,
and her mother, Kath, attempts to ‘keep house’, though that
task largely falls to Laura, as does the care of her young
sister Viktoria.
Laura tries to prevent fights between her parents by
anticipating the tasks of the household – making lunch
for her father, lighting the stove, and attending to the
animals. For the most part, Kath prefers to be alone in her
garden studio, making ceramics. However, as much as she
tries, Laura can’t hide her mother’s ‘deficiencies’ from her
father, and they fight regularly while Laura attempts to
soothe her sister.
One day, after the arguments have reached epic
proportions, Laura and her sister return to an empty home.
It is also the day of a significant flash flood. Hearing that
Kath may have gone to the creek to find clay for her pots,
Bruce goes to search for her. While he is gone, Laura finds
a note from her mother but, in a panic, puts it into the stove
where it bursts into flames. She does not reveal the note’s
content or her life-changing act to anyone over the ensuing
40 years, and must live with the associated guilt, especially
after extensive searches fail to find Kath and a memorial
service is held.
This book is many things. It’s an intricate portrait
of the relationship between sisters, where one is highly
dependent on the other. It’s a story of grief over a missing
mother and wife. Anchor Point is also an homage to the
Australian landscape and its excesses of flood and fire.
The only issue for me was that the book lacked narrative
tension, and any sense of ‘resolution’ came late in the book.
The Ash Burner is Kári Gíslason’s first novel. Midway
through the book, a character, on the eve of his
departure from his hometown, insists that his best friend
Ted write him letters. ‘He thought you could say a lot more
that way,’ Ted tells us, ‘that email was inferior.’ This
attitude runs though the entirety of The Ash Burner; though
it’s set in modern Australia, its sensibilities lie much more
in the past. There are no actual spirits here, but
nevertheless this is a novel that’s supremely haunted.
It begins with the teenage Ted throwing himself into
the ocean, with a half-sense that he’ll somehow be able to
find his dead mother. He’s swept onto the rocks, badly hurt,
and pulled out by his father. While recuperating in hospital,
Ted meets Anthony, a boy a few years ahead of him at
school, and Claire, Anthony’s girlfriend.
The increasingly intense friendship between the
three of them forms the bulk of the narrative, with Ted
somewhat in awe of both of them and taking part in their
plans to leave the town of Lion’s Head and move to Sydney.
The story spans years, and though there is a quietness and
subtlety to the characters’ relationships (Ted is criticised
on several occasions for being far too serious) the narrative
does take some surprising turns, with one of the novel’s
final revelations hitting the right balance of being both
shocking and wholly believable.
In Gíslason’s first book, memoir The Promise of Iceland,
he showed that he was a nuanced writer, and here, with
The Ash Burner, he has again shown his skill at mapping the
subtle shifts in our lives. It’s a thoughtful work that should
leave an impression long after it’s put down.
Annie Condon is from Readings Hawthorn
Chris Somerville is from Readings Carlton
9
Short Stories
HOT LITTLE HANDS
A MAN MADE ENTIRELY OF BATS
Abigail Ulman
Patrick Lenton
Hamish Hamilton. PB. $29.99
Spineless Wonders. PB. $22.99
The characters in Abigail Ulman’s debut collection of
short stories, Hot Little Hands, all float on the
spectrum between youth and adulthood. These teenagers
and 20-somethings are trying to figure out how to grow up –
they’re confused, funny and (sometimes painfully) familiar.
Wunderkind blogger-turned-author Amelia can’t finish her
book so decides to have a baby. Elise and Jenni, 16 and bored
with their routine of text-messages, Vodka Cruisers and
casual sex, decide go back to horse camp. Claire’s trying to
break up with her boyfriend, but he makes a great espresso
blend, plus she’s pregnant and pretty sure he’s the father.
Hot Little Hands is a collection that grapples with
what coming of age means in this decade. Comparisons
with Lena Dunham’s Girls and Not That Kind of Girl are
inevitable here. Ulman’s strength as a storyteller stems
from her ability to present the experiences of young
women as strikingly relatable, as well as entertaining.
This collection speaks to the confusion and selfishness of
youth, examining conflicting desires – hedonism, ambition
and anxiety. The girls and women in Hot Little Hands are
immature, often privileged, and difficult to like, but it’s
hard to pinpoint how seriously Ulman is taking them and
their baggage. Her pop-culture references and hipsterisms
verge on self-conscious – fixie bikes, literary tattoos and
warehouse parties are a staple of Claire’s three linked
stories in particular. But perhaps the frustration is merely
an effect of inevitable reflections about how close to home,
at times, the references and characters seem.
A new voice in the Australian literary scene, Ulman is
a strong writer – her dialogue is sharp, often very funny,
and packs an emotional punch. Ulman's stories are honest
and will definitely strike a chord with readers. There’s
a compelling freshness and energy in these stories that
makes Hot Little Hands an addictive read.
The debut collection by writer, playwright and
possible mad scientist Patrick Lenton pulls apart
icons of 21st-century pop culture and reassembles them
in an ungodly mixture of satire, fan fiction, noir, schlock
horror and absurdist humour. In these tiny stories,
vignettes and sketches, Lenton takes common
metaphors, one-liners and eye-watering puns and riffs
on them, teasing out sublime and ridiculous worlds
filled with second-rate superheroes, rogue FBI agents
and washed-up sitcom stars. In the opening story,
‘Mooncat’, the protagonist, who inexplicably turns into
an unpleasant ginger cat every full moon, tries to turn
his condition to his advantage. In ‘Sheila Discovers
Magnetism’, a woman believes love to be a form of
magnetic force and carries iron filings in her hand to
gauge attraction. In ‘Insomni-Yak’, a man unable to
sleep enlists the help of ... well, take a guess.
Lenton’s writing is confident, witty and unashamedly
fun, playing with genre tropes and narrative conventions.
A number of pieces in A Man Made Entirely of Bats take
the form of monologues, lending them the rhythm and
cadences of stand-up comedy. Like any comedian, some
jokes land better than others, but the delight Lenton takes
in wordplay and narrative experimentation is infectious,
and there are frequent moments that are laugh-outloud hilarious. But there are moments of poignancy
and melancholy too, and juxtaposed against the overall
playfulness and strangeness of the collection, these
moments, when they come, knock the wind out of you.
Alan Vaarwerk is the editorial assistant for the Readings
Monthly
Stella Charls is marketing and events coordinator for Readings
Historical Fiction
THE ANCHORESS
SKIN
Robyn Cadwallader
Ilka Tampke
HarperCollins. PB. Was $32.99
Text. PB. $29.99
$27.99
Set in England in 1255, The Anchoress follows the
plight of Sarah, a 17-year-old who chooses to become
an anchoress – a holy woman – and spend her life locked in
a small cell to the side of a church, devoting her days
entirely to prayer. In making this choice, Sarah is forgoing
sunlight, communication with the outside world and all
stimuli, other than her anchoress rule book and the Bible,
for the rest of her life.
Sarah is unprepared for the brutal tedium and tortured
nature of her new life. She is given two maids who attend to
her from a room adjacent to her cell, and her relationship
with the women forms the backbone of the story, along
with a small cast of other characters who move in and out
of Sarah’s life in various ways.
The Anchoress arrived with much hype, including
comparisons to Hannah Kent’s Burial Rites, and it is being
simultaneously published throughout the UK, USA and
Australia, which is significant for a debut novelist. This
attention is largely deserved, as Robyn Cadwallader is a
skilled storyteller. The Anchoress is essentially 300 pages of
someone sitting on their own in a small room, and into this
Cadwallader weaves a deeply interesting examination of
madness, faith, grief, anger and freedom. It is an intimate
novel that deals closely with the wants and desperate
desires of its characters, and provides an insight into the
burdens carried by women of that time.
Cadwallader is especially talented at world-building
and clearly knows her history because The Anchoress is
peppered with fascinating details. She vividly captures
the intricacies and sensibilities of the time, but her prose
always feels fresh and contemporary. This is a debut
Australian novel that sets itself apart from its peers.
Ailia is moments old when she is left on Cookmother’s
doorstep in Caer Cad, on the eve of the Beltane
festival. With no knowledge of her family, she is never
called to skin, and so she is only half-born; a body without
a soul. In the Tribequeen’s kitchen, Ailia is luckier than
most unskinned, and instead of being cast out to the
fringes of society, she is raised with Cookmother’s love and
guidance. But without skin, Ailia will remain isolated from
her countrymen until her unceremonial death.
Tampke ignites Ailia’s prophetic narration with
the rhythm of an internal monologue, dominated by
her obsessive mission to find her skin, her totem, and
to know her true identity. At fourteen, Ailia is on the
cusp of womanhood, and Skin reveals itself as a tale
of many threads: a coming of age novel; a love story; a
quest narrative. The suspense is pulled taught between
these complementary forces, hounded by the impending
Roman invasion.
Set in Britain in the first century AD, Skin occupies a
unique space in historical fiction. Steeped in Druid lore
with a tangible spirit realm, it reads like fantasy but is
based, at times unbelievably, on fact. A link to our ancient
Iron-Age past, and predating the Arthurian Legend by
some 500 years, Skin offers an alternative to the Christian
tradition that came to dominate Western culture, and
much historical fiction along with it.
Ilka Tampke imbues her narrative with fantastical
tropes – a shape shifter; a mystical river; an otherworldly
old forest; an ethereal plane – offering the reader a
glimpse into a distant alternate reality; a possible history.
Her vision is clear and brought to life vividly through the
strength of her singular heroine. We have not heard the
last from this resonant new Australian voice.
Nina Kenwood is the digital marketing manager for Readings
Sophie Shanahan is a freelance reviewer
10
New Fiction
Australian
A SHORT HISTORY OF
RICHARD KLINE
Amanda Lohrey
Black Inc. PB. $29.99
Plagued by a
niggling sense of
lack since childhood,
Richard Kline
approaches middle age
struggling to suppress
his growing anger.
While marriage,
fatherhood and career
provide glimpses of
happiness, the talented software engineer
is never wholly satisfied with life,
descending repeatedly into cycles of
boredom and despair.
When a road rage incident pushes him
to the brink, he unwittingly stumbles on a
path of spiritual growth through meditation
and, ultimately, devotion to a guru. No one
is more surprised by this development than
Richard himself. But it’s not all glossy eyed
meditators in robes from here on. Richard’s
path to address the ‘divine discontentment’
he feels is a tough one.
Lohrey’s latest novel continues her
interest in creating characters beset by
spiritual chaos and the subsequent drive
for reinvention. Never trite or superficial
in her exploration of spirituality, she
preempts a skeptical readership by creating
an openly cynical character. And it is
perhaps because of the subtle crumbling
of Richard’s cool logic that his eventual
moments of awakening, and conversely,
disappointment and disillusionment are so
beautifully and movingly evoked.
Collisions – intended, serendipitous,
often calamitous – occur throughout
the book, hinting at forces that motivate
us and go beyond conscious thought
and conventional rationale. As Richard
gravitates clumsily to mentors and
eventually his own guru (a figure who will
be familiar to many yoga devotees), Lohrey
cleverly teases out the relationship between
devotion and dependence.
New age ideas and therapies are
often mined solely for humour in fiction,
rather than the intelligent dissection they
receive there. It’s ambitious subject matter,
tackling the meaning of life head on, but
Lohrey’s deft prose and sensitivity to the
complexity of portraying her character’s
inner life lends Kline’s spiritual quest
a level of authenticity that feels utterly
convincing. This is a fascinating read by
one of Australia’s finest contemporary
writers.
Sally Keighery is a freelance reviewer
DOWN TO THE RIVER
S.J. Finn
Sleepers. PB. $24.95
Small, independent
publishers exist to
push boundaries and
bring to light books
that mainstream
companies might
consider too risky to
publish. Down To the
River is the second
novel by S.J. Finn from
Sleepers Publishing and it takes on the
extremely uncomfortable and distressing
subject of paedophilia. Set in a small
Victorian country town, the story is told
from three points of view: journalist Joni,
her teenage son, Luke, and editor-in-chief
of the local paper, Roy. When a child sex
offender is discovered to be living nearby
and local residents band together in
protest, Joni begins to cover the story for
the local paper. At the same time, her
partner Tiff stumbles upon dairies written
by Luke’s father, Angelo, who has been
missing for over a decade. As Joni begins to
read the diaries a very uncomfortable
picture emerges ensnaring her own family
in the story she is covering for the paper.
Novels that are narrated from multiple
points of view can sometimes be clunky
and where some characters are stronger
than others it can be frustrating when a
new chapter is narrated by a less inspiring
member of the story. Here, however, S.J.
Finn has managed the alternating narrators
so seamlessly that I hadn’t realised as I
was reading that each chapter shifts in
the same order from one character to
another. The teenage son in particular is
skilfully written and although at times I
wondered at his eloquence and ability to
talk openly about his emotions (not like
most teenage boys I know) I still found
him believable and compelling. Angelo’s
diary entries bring in a fourth voice in this
story and what is revealed here challenges
any preconceptions I might have had
about the subject. This is at times an
incredibly uncomfortable book to read,
but good fiction should be challenging and
thankfully there are still small publishers
willing to take risks and bring important
books like this to light.
Kara Nicholson is from Readings Carlton
HIS OTHER HOUSE
Sarah Armstrong
PanMac. PB. $29.99
From the author of the
Miles Franklin
shortlisted Salt Rain
comes a taut drama set
in the lush Australian
subtropics that poses
questions about moral
courage and
accountability. Dr Quinn
Davidson and his wife
Marianna have endured years of
unsuccessful IVF and several miscarriages,
and Quinn can't face another painful
attempt to conceive. Marianna is desperate
to be a mother and their marriage is feeling
the strain. At a small-town practice a few
hours from their home, Quinn meets Rachel,
the daughter of one of his patients. Drawn to
each other, it's not long before they find
themselves in a passionate affair and Quinn
realises he must choose between the two
women. Then Marianna announces a
surprise natural conception, news that will
change the course of all their lives.
THE FIRE SERMON
Francesca Haig
HarperCollins. PB. $29.99
Nobody dodges the split
between Alpha and
Omega. Born as twins,
they are raised as enemies:
one strong Alpha twin and
one mutated Omega.
Forced to live apart, the
Omegas are ruthlessly
oppressed by their Alpha
counterparts. The Alphas
are the elite. Once their weaker twin has
been cast aside, they’re free to live in
privilege and safety, their Omega twin far
from their thoughts. Cass and Zach are
both perfect on the outside: no missing
limbs, no visible Omega mutation. But
Cass has a secret: one that Zach will stop
at nothing to expose. The potential to
change the world lies in both their hands.
One will have to defeat the other to see
their vision of the future come to pass, but
if they’re not careful both will die in the
struggle for power.
ONLY THE ANIMALS
Ceridwen Dovey
Penguin. PB. $19.99
Perhaps only the
animals can tell us
what it is to be human.
The souls of ten
animals caught up in
human conflicts over
the last century tell
their astonishing
stories of life and
death. In a trench on
the Western Front a cat recalls her owner
Colette's theatrical antics in Paris. In Nazi
Germany a dog seeks enlightenment. A
Russian tortoise once owned by the
Tolstoys drifts in space during the Cold
War. In the siege of Sarajevo a bear starving
to death tells a fairytale. And a dolphin sent
to Iraq by the US Navy writes a letter to
Sylvia Plath.
International
NOBODY IS EVER
MISSING
Catherine Lacey
Granta. PB. $27.99
Catherine Lacey’s
impressive first
novel follows 28-yearold Elyria who, without
telling her husband,
boards a plane from
New York to New
Zealand leaving behind
her stable and
outwardly enviable life.
Seeking to ‘divorce from everything, to
divorce my own history’, she travels down
the length of New Zealand, hitch-hiking
her way to the house of a man she has only
met once and whose offer of a place to stay
she suspects ‘was one of those things a
person says on impulse and then
aggressively defends to mask the mistake’.
She travels with a destination, but without
purpose. We, the readers, reside in her head
as she dips in and out of the lives of the
people she meets on her journey south.
Elyria is a woman on the brink – of
society, of her sanity, of reality. She is
disengaged and detached but Lacey
equips her with uncanny insights and
dark humour. There are moments in this
novel when the skill of Lacey’s language
makes you pause. Particularly in the way
that she articulates the trap of domesticity,
the vulnerability of being a woman alone
in the world and the feeling, that many
of us have, of wanting to walk away from
our own lives. Her use of long, luxurious
sentences is often masterful and watching
them unfold is the central pleasure of
reading this novel.
It is a blistering portrait of a woman
adrift and a penetrating examination
of domesticity and alienation. A novel
that, while pervaded by melancholy, is
punctuated with comedy and moments of
electrifying insight.
Brigid Mullane is a freelance reviewer
DANCING IN THE DARK:
MY STRUGGLE BOOK 4
Karl Ove Knausgaard
Harvill. PB. Was $32.99
$27.99
Cards on the
table: at time of
writing I haven’t yet
finished this, the fourth
volume in Karl Ove
Knausgaard’s
‘autobiographical
novel’ cycle. In his
almost punishingly
expansive style
previous volumes have immersed readers,
with varying degrees of reflective
interjection, in Knausgaard’s narrative of
his life. These accounts have included the
death of his father, an embittered, drunk
brute who made life hell for the young Karl
Ove, and ultimately estranged himself from
the family; the dissolution of Knausgaard’s
first marriage and his falling wildly in love
with the writer Linda Boström; their
having children, and Knausgaard’s
frustrations at the impingement on his
writing life by the challenges of not only
parenthood, but also of having a partner
afflicted with bipolar disorder; and
Knausgaard’s boyhood as a timid youth
tyrannised by his father, followed by the
first stirrings of his soon-to-be-rampaging
hormones.
Volume 4 picks up at a point of new
beginnings. Fresh out of high school,
18-year-old Karl Ove has moved to northern
Norway to temp as a teacher and begin his
writing career in earnest. He likes getting
drunk and dancing to his favourite records
in the solitude of his own apartment. But
he’s also ashamed of his virginity. Typically,
in that it is at once patience-testing and
self-abasing, by page 100 he’s already had
five erections, prompted for the most part
by beautiful students, girls and young
women who are only a few years younger
than he is. Readers of previous volumes
will find these passages of lusty adolescent
scopophilia undercut with unease: we
already know that it’s at this point in his life
that Karl Ove fell tortuously in love with a
student – one of his youngest, a girl who’s
just 13 years old.
Knausgaard is an advocate for writing
the unsayable, for plumbing the deepest
recesses of human consciousness and
experience. As such, he’s relentless in airing
his most honest, and therefore often least
admirable, self. I think it’s precisely this
that makes My Struggle such a generous,
dealienating and necessary endeavour.
Gerard Elson is from Readings St Kilda
HAUSFRAU
Jill Alexander Essbaum
Mantle. PB. $29.99
From acclaimed
poet Jill
Alexander Essbaum
comes this debut novel,
Hausfrau. She brings
with it her poetic
inclinations: passages
are fleeting, moving
through past and
present, but measured
and curated with care. The experiences of
her troubled heroine, Anna, are met with
simile, and often-lovely figurations.
Anna is a housewife (hausfrau: house
woman), an American expat who married
a Swiss banker, and who has lived for nine
years in suburban Zürich. After years of
foreignness and Swiss tourism, Anna has
begun a German language class – she is
ready to communicate, to make friends, to
make it work. In the class she meets Archie,
a Scotsman, and they begin an affair, but as
her story unfolds we realise that Archie is
neither the first nor the last of Anna’s lovers.
Essbaum conjures literature’s most
notorious affairs; Anna Karenina’s fate and
Madame Bovary’s demise may sit, however
implicitly suggested, at the foreground
of the reader’s mind. For me, Lessing’s
Anna, of The Golden Notebook, presented
herself, and occasionally, the sorrowful,
tender Laura Jesson of Noel Coward’s Brief
Encounter.
Essbaum’s Anna, however, is not a
literary person, and her points of reference
–meted out in an ongoing conversation
(or match) with her psychoanalyst – are
abstract and philosophical. Anna is very
emotional but withdrawn, her feelings
are far from the surface and no human
interaction can draw her out. Yet she breaks
pieces off and gives herself away; her heart
handed over like ‘an open wallet to a thief’.
The non-linear narrative and the
strange dialogue in scenes with the shrink
present the book’s only real hurdles. It is a
sometimes funny, sometimes sexy read and
it will ring true for many family women. It
will also open up a library of references for
literary readers. Hausfrau denotes a very
promising transition from Essbaum.
Jemima Bucknell is the online fulfilment
manager for Readings
THE BURIED GIANT
Kazuo Ishiguro
A&U. PB. Was $29.99
$24.99
I imagined that I
would read
Ishiguro’s first novel in
10 years quickly. I
thought: there is my
weekend sorted. Ah.
Not so. This fable of
sorts is not a quick read.
This is a slow, careful
tale about the mysteries of memories and
relationships. Told very much like a
fairytale, The Buried Giant is set in old
England, post King Arthur but still when
dragons and witchcraft are part of life. The
story centres on the journey, across villages,
of an isolated elderly couple who are
devoted to one another but full of fear of
memories. The narration is steady as each
character they meet on their journey brings
memories and ideas. This novel is not for
everyone, not even perhaps for all of his fans,
but it is for readers who enjoy a mystical
take on the meaning of life. His writing here
is more a cross between Beckett and Atwood
in style, and is certainly more fantastical and
meditative than his previous award-winning
work. The Buried Giant is, as we expect,
beautifully written and it is undoubtedly
worth the gentle pace for those with the
predisposition to be swept into the
pondering abyss.
Chris Gordon is the events manager for
Readings
THE FISHERMEN
Chigozie Obioma
Scribe. PB. $29.99
Chigozie Obioma’s
debut novel, The
Fishermen, is an
outstanding addition to
African literature. Fans
of Chimamanda Ngozi
Adichie – Half of a
Yellow Sun – will relish
it’s distinct Nigerian
placement. The sibling bond is tight
between the four brothers in this story. It is
a bond fortified through triumph and
adversity. The narrator is Benjamin, the
youngest of the brothers. Through his
accounts we learn of the brothers’
fortuitous meeting with a Nigerian
presidential aspirant and of the boys’
daring escape from a violent political coup
that threatens their hometown. Political
instability, economic hardship and
corruption are rife, but life is modestly
privileged for these brothers.
Their father holds lofty dreams for
them. Bestowing gratuitous praise upon
them, he believes his sons will distinguish
themselves with professional careers
and will continue their upward mobility
by migrating to Canada. As the family's
patriarch, he is a strict disciplinarian. His
sons live in fear and awe of him but when
he is transferred to a different city for work
the boys’ new-found freedom has them
considering their own dreams.
With their father's absence, parental
control is lost. Their mother, subservient
in a traditional household, feels powerless
to influence her sons. The tendency
of both parents to speak in parables
confusing their sons is yet another concern.
Misinterpretation, albeit comical, creates a
disconnect and a gulf opens up into which
dangerous missteps are taken.
When a local madman makes an
ill-omened prophecy, the alliance of
brotherhood is broken and fear and
mistrust set brother-against-brother. As
tragedy strikes, the family recoils in shock
and fails to recognise a plot brewing that
will bring even greater heartache for all.
Natalie Platten is from Readings Malvern
THE GHOST ESTATE
John Connell
Picador. PB. $29.99
Born in County
Longford,
Ireland, awardwinning journalist,
John Connell
currently resides in
Sydney. However, it is
to his home town of
Longford that Connell
returns for the setting
of his first novel, The Ghost Estate.
Intended to be a novella for inclusion in a
collection of short stories, Connell says the
idea for The Ghost Estate just popped into
his head one day and it wouldn't go away
– he just had to write it.
The story is set in contemporary
Ireland during the time of the ‘Celtic
Tiger’, when the country was experiencing
unprecedented economic growth. Gerard
McQuaid, a young electrician, wants to take
advantage of Ireland’s building boom to set
himself up for life. He plans to get enough
money together to build his dream home
for himself and his girlfriend. His boss has
handed over the business to him and he and
his small team of workers are hired to work
on the redevelopment of the run down
estate of Birchview Manor. As he works,
McQuaid hears the story of the manor’s
original owner, Henry Lefoyle, who owned
the estate during the 1800s, a time of great
upheaval in Ireland. As McQuaid learns
of Lefoyle’s fate, his own life begins to
unravel. The GFC hits Ireland, building
works come to a standstill, workers are laid
off and Birchview Manor is left derelict
once again.
While The Ghost Estate isn’t the greatest
piece of Irish literature I’ve ever read, there
is still something quite endearing about it.
Connell manages to capture the spirit of the
A new town, a new set of murders
for Detective Joe Sable …
‘A dazzling mix
of elegant prose,
convincing period detail,
and heart-stopping
violence.’
Angela Savage
Praise for THE HOLIDAY MURDERS
‘[A]s close to perfect as a mystery can be.’
Sunday Age
‘[A] fascinating cautionary tale that explores
the wonderful bond between crime fiction and
the shadows lurking in our collective past.’
Australian Book Review
11
12
Irish builder and of Ireland itself at a time
when the future looked prosperous. In many
ways it is also a social commentary, showing
how ordinary people are very much at the
mercy of politicians who don't always have
their best interests at heart.
Sharon Peterson is from Readings Carlton
Happy
Birthday
Readings!
To celebrate
Readings’
46th
birthday we
are offering
10% off all full
priced books
in all shops
and online on
Thursday 5
March.
ADULT ONSET
Ann-Marie MacDonald
Hodder. PB. $29.99
Mary Rose McKinnon
has two children with
her partner Hilary and a
fractured relationship
with her mother, Dolly;
she also has issues with
anger management and
lives in fear of hurting
the children. These
feelings seem somehow
rooted in a part of her childhood she has
trouble remembering. Is Dolly - the kind of
big personality who makes all Mary Rose's
friends, and even waiters in coffee shops,
exclaim ‘I love your Mum!’ – harbouring a
dark secret about what caused Mary Rose's
childhood injuries, and is Mary Rose doomed
to follow the same path with her own children?
Please note that this offer is
only valid from 9am - midnight
Thursday 5 March and on in
stock items only. Not valid with
any other offer or discount.
FOURTH OF JULY CREEK
Smith Henderson
Windmill. PB. $19.99
After trying to help
Benjamin Pearl, an
undernourished, nearly
feral eleven-year-old
boy living in the
Montana wilderness,
social worker Pete Snow
comes face-to-face with
the boy’s profoundly
disturbed father,
Jeremiah. Pete slowly earns a measure of
trust from this paranoid survivalist itching
for a final conflict that will signal the coming
End of Times. But as Pete’s own family spins
out of control, Jeremiah’s activities spark the
full-blown interest of the FBI, putting Pete
at the centre of a massive manhunt from
which no one will emerge unscathed.
THE FAITHFUL COUPLE
A.D. Miller
AQUARIUM
Little, Brown. PB. $29.99
David Vann
Text. PB. $29.99
Twelve-year-old Caitlin
lives alone with her
mother in subsidised
housing next to an
airport in Seattle. Each
day, while she waits to
be picked up after
school, Caitlin visits the
local aquarium to study
the fish. When she
befriends an old man at the tanks one day,
who seems as enamoured of the fish as she,
Caitlin cracks open a dark family secret and
propels her once-blissful relationship with
her mother towards a precipice of terrifying
consequence. Aquarium takes the reader
into the heart of a brave girl whose longing
for love and capacity for forgiveness
transform the damaged people around her.
I AM RADAR
Reif Larsen
Harvill. PB. $32.99
To receive the
discount in any of
our shops say ‘Happy
Birthday Readings’
over the counter, or
type ‘BIRTHDAY’ in
the promotions code
section online.
rural community under occupation. Suite
Française is a novel, and now a new film
starring Kristin Scott Thomas and Michelle
Williams, that teems with wonderful
characters struggling with the new regime.
In 1975, a black child,
Radar Radmanovic, is
mysteriously born to
white parents in New
Jersey. Falling in with a
secretive group of
puppeteers and scientists
who stage performances
in war zones around the
world, he is soon forced to confront the true
nature of his identity. Radar rapidly becomes
entangled with events stretching from
Belgrade in a time of siege to arctic Norway,
from Cambodia before the murderous Khmer
Rouge regime to the modern-day Congo.
California, 1993: Neil
Collins and Adam Tayler,
two young British men
on the cusp of adulthood,
meet at a hostel in San
Diego. They strike up a
friendship that, while
platonic, feels as
intoxicating as a
romance. On a camping
trip to Yosemite they lead each other to
behave in ways that, years later, they will
desperately regret. The Faithful Couple
follows Neil and Adam across two decades,
through girlfriends and wives, success and
failure, children and bereavements, as power
and remorse ebb between them.
MELNITZ
Charles Lewinsky
Atlantic. PB. $32.99
Melnitz is the saga of the
Swiss-Jewish Meijer
family, spanning five
generations from the
Franco-Prussian War to
World War II. Cattledealer Solomon Meijer
leads a largely untroubled
life, but all of this is set to
end when he answers a knock at the door in
the middle of the night. On the doorstep
stands his young distant cousin, Janki,
half-dead and begging for refuge. He is given
a place in the bosom of the family, but when
Janki recovers and regains his ambition and
his fine-looks, he will change the Meijer
family's lives for generations.
TOUCH
Claire North
SUITE FRANÇAISE
Irene Nemirovsky & Sandra Smith
(trans.)
It happened so long ago,
I’ve forgotten the details.
But he was desperate,
hungry enough to kill. As
I was dying, my hand
touched his. That’s when
my first switch took
place. I looked through
the eyes of my killer just
in time to see my own
body die. Now switching is easy. I can jump
from body to body, have any life, be anyone.
Vintage. PB. $19.99
Set during the year that
France fell to the Nazis,
Suite Française falls into
two parts. The first is a
depiction of a group of
Parisians as they flee
the Nazi invasion; the
second follows the
inhabitants of a small
New Crime
Dead Write THE PORT FAIRY MURDERS
with Fiona Hardy
Crime Book of the Month
IF SHE DID IT
Jessica Treadway
Hanna and Joe Schutt are unsure about their awkward
daughter Dawn’s first love, the handsome yet unnerving Rud,
but are pleased to see their daughter happy – until the night they
are viciously beaten by a croquet mallet in bed, leaving Joe dead
and Hanna with facial injuries so acute that they leave her, nearly
three years later, still with visible scars and a brain injury that
impedes her memory of the night. So when Rud, jailed for the
attack, wins an appeal, Hanna needs to try to recall what really
happened that night so that she can put him back behind bars. She must also defy those
around her, even her best friend and other daughter, Iris , who both insist that the killer
was not Rud at all, but someone much closer to her heart.
‘This is a stay-up-late, stare-at-your-child-suspiciously-the-next-day thriller.’
I think I’ve considered, in the past, that memory loss in books often feels contrived, but
Treadway’s skill as an author – she’s a creative writing professor –never made me feel like
Hanna’s injury was cheap. No, she did not want to remember the day her beloved husband
died, but she never seemed to be actively pushing it away. Likewise, when Dawn does
things that arouse suspicion, Hanna does not dismiss them without consideration, but
asks questions, fights back, and searches for reality in a world split apart. She wants her
daughter, long adored despite being maligned at school for her lazy eye and slight oddness,
to love her, to be loved, to shake off everyone’s view of her, and to be happy. Dawn or not,
someone is a threat to Hanna’s life now, and she needs to break into her own mind to find
out who it is. This is a stay-up-late, stare-at-your-child-suspiciously-the-next-day thriller.
GUN CONTROL
Peter Corris
DEATH UNDER A
TUSCAN SUN
A&U. PB. $24.99
Michele Giuttari
Corris, the ‘godfather’
of Australian crime
fiction and an enjoyable
writer if there ever was
one, has been writing
Cliff Hardy books for
30 years – and here, in
book 40, his fans
rejoice again. Hardy is
hired by Timothy
Greenhall, an ex-shooting champion, to find
out who was behind Timothy’s son’s grisly
murder. The case goes from city to country,
from dodgy to straight to beautiful cops, and
on the road with bikers who may be more
help than horror. The first death isn’t the
last – it never is – and as guns fire over
Sydney, Hardy just needs to dodge the
bullets and save the day.
CAMILLE
Pierre LeMaitre
Headline. PB. $29.99
LeMaitre, once a
literary professor and
now happily drowning
in crime-fiction
awards, finishes up his
incredibly popular
Camille Verhoeven
trilogy with a book
about the detective
himself – a man with
the kind of shattered past writers enjoy
giving poor innocent protagonists. Four
years after the death that broke his heart,
Camille has a new love, Anne Forestier,
who stumbles onto a robbery on the
Champs-Élysées which is as heart-racing
and brutal as anything LeMaitre has
previously penned. Shot, beaten, but alive,
her hospital stay is further darkened by the
knowledge that someone is after her. But
the man who loves her has never been
known to abide by the rules, and if someone
is after Anne, then Camille is after them.
For eight years,
Giuttari was the head
of Florence’s police
force – so when he
writes about fictional
Florentine police chief
Michele Ferrara, he
knows what the hell
he’s on about. Here,
Ferrara must find
serial killer Daniel De Robertis, delirious
with rage and revenge and now on the run
after escaping his prison cell and vanishing.
Meanwhile, in the glorious Tuscan
countryside, a high-flying couple are
murdered, and a clue left at the scene – nine
gruesome photographs of nine dead women
– sets Ferrara on darkly personal trail of
obsession, violence, and power through the
most impenetrable walls of Italian society.
THE EXIT
Helen FitzGerald
Faber. PB. $24.99
The first crime book I
ever read – Agatha
Christie’s wonderful By
the Pricking of My
Thumbs – started in a
nursing home with an
‘old dear’ waffling on
about murder and being
patted gently on the head
as things became much
more sinister. Here, Catherine, a young
woman begrudgingly working at a nursing
home, meets Rose, a resident who suffers
from dementia and wanders in and out of
the present and her long-distant past. Rose is
convinced something is wrong in room seven.
Cynical at first, but humouring one of the few
residents she can tolerate, Catherine begins to
suspect that Rose’s desperate ravings contain
some truth, and that danger is just down the
hall.
Robert Gott
Scribe. PB. $29.99
In 1943, the early days of
Victoria’s homicide
department, Detective
Joe Sable and Constable
Helen Lord are on the
trail of George Starling, a
remnant from the book’s
prequel, The Holiday
Murders. Meanwhile, in
scenic Port Fairy, a
double murder occurs that homicide originally
considers fairly cut and dry, but it’s not like
Robert Gott to make anything easy when it
could instead be thrilling. This series takes a
look at the conflicts of a past that sometimes
seems not so far away – religious intolerance,
industrial problems, gender politics – against
a backdrop of a beautifully preserved Greater
Melbourne area and its undercurrents of
blisteringly brutal violence.
THE PRINCE
Vito Bruschini
Text. PB. $29.99
Need a meaty historical
crime fiction fix? Then
read The Prince, a
novelisation with its
hooks in truth that
follows Prince
Ferdinando Licata, a
rich landowner with all
the generous charisma
and bloodthirsty
violence you need in the fictional founder of
the Sicilian mafia. Starting in 1920s Sicily as
Licata’s manipulation of the poor and
defiance against the fascists sees him booted
out of Italy, it moves to the 1930s and Licata
in a new little town where he can flex his
power – New York – and then back to Italy
during the Allied invasion of WWII. Smart,
well-researched and gloriously epic.
SECOND LIFE
S.J. Watson
Text. PB. Was $29.99
$26.99
From the author of the
smash hit Before I Go To
Sleep comes the story of
Julia, middle-aged and
lacking excitement until
her younger sister, Kate,
is murdered in Paris.
Feeling guilty that she
wasn’t helping her sister
enough and that their
complicated past is sending her emotions all
over the place, Julia discovers that Kate
enjoyed salacious internet shenanigans and so
goes online to find someone who knows what
happened to her. However, the temptations of
anonymity, pretence, and handsome men may
lead Julia into a new and sinister world.
BAD SEED
Alan Carter
Fremantle. PB. $29.99
Newly minted Acting
Detective Sergeant Cato
Kwong turns up at the
scene of a multiple
homicide and recognises
the bodies even when
their faces are, well,
unrecognisable. Rich
property developer
Francis Tan, his wife,
and two of his three children are dead. Now,
trying to find out who killed his old friend,
Cato must dive into the world of shady online
deals – and resurface alive.
13
14
New Young Adult Fiction
See books for kids, junior and middle readers on pages 18–19
Young Adult Book of the Month
EVENTUAL POPPY DAY
Libby Hathorn
Have fun with stories
brought to life by our
Children’s Storytellers!
Enjoy weekly readings from
a range of new release
picture books (and some
old favourites).
Two artists, white feathers, first loves and broken
promises: Eventual Poppy Day is a story about learning to
look at the world in a different light. Australian writer and poet
Libby Hathorn (Thunderwith) has created a story that is both
realistic and full of hope. Eventual Poppy Day interweaves the
stories of two 17-year-old men: Maurice and his great-great
nephew, Oliver.
Maurice’s story allows us to see the brutality of World War I
and its propaganda machine, but also introduces us to the camaraderie and friendship,
hard won on the shores of Gallipoli and at the Western Front. It is Maurice’s story –
preserved in a tin box of his sister’s – that saves Oliver from entering a downward
spiral. Despite unstable family circumstances, Oliver learns to find light through
Maurice’s words and artwork.
This book is educational and brilliantly researched. It is also a beautiful read. Hathorn
has managed to create a story suitable for young adults who are reading books faster
than they can find them. It is insightful, gripping and honest, perfect for sophisticated
readers 14 and up.
Savannah Indigo is from Readings Malvern
THE AGE OF MIRACLES
Karen Thompson Walker
Simon & Schuster. PB. $15.99
Carlton
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309 Lygon St, 9347 6633
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any full-priced
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story time session.
*Discount valid for 30 minutes
after completion of each story
time session.
Please note: Story time is not a
child-minding service.
We ask that parents stay with their
children for the reading.
Julia is 11 years
old when the
slowing is announced
by experts. That night,
the world clock gains
56 minutes due to the
slowing of the Earth
on its axis. As the
Earth continues to
slow, minutes and
then hours are added to each day. At first
people go about their business, but as the
clock reaches a 30 hour day, world
leaders decide to revert to the 24-hour
clock in the hope that life can remain
normal. But this decision sees the
dividing of society as some people refuse
the 24-hour clock and instead choose to
follow their circadian rhythm, while
others start to get strange symptoms they
believe are caused by the slowing.
While all of this is going on, Julia is
simply trying to grow up. A loner with
few to no friends, Julia dreams of a sad
boy at school and deals with some harsh
realisations, including that people can
disappoint and betray each other. She
must also face the fact that just because
the world is slowly killing itself and
humanity doesn’t mean that she, or
anyone else, can give up. Told from the
perspective of Julia in her 20s, The Age of
Miracles is a scary yet touching comingof-age novel. Highly recommended for
readers 13 and up.
Katherine Dretzke is from Readings Hawthorn
THE SIN EATER’S
DAUGHTER
Melinda Salisbury
Scholastic. PB. $16.99
Debut author
Melinda Salisbury
has built an authentic
fantasy world in this
first book in a trilogy.
In the land of
Lormere, Twylla is
considered incredibly
dangerous. A touch
from her can kill a
person because her body is covered in
poison. The Queen uses Twylla to execute
her victims, but she also has a greater
purpose for her. Twylla has been chosen
to marry the prince, since he has no sister
to marry. In Lormere, they think nothing
of using incest to keep bloodlines pure.
But when Twylla falls in love with one of
her guards, who is from neighbouring
land Tregallia, she learns not only a great
deal about his more enlightened world,
but also about the flaws in her own
beliefs. With plenty of romance, an
interesting concept and numerous plot
twists, this is an engaging read.
Angela Crocombe is from Readings Carlton
NIGHTBIRD
Alice Hoffman
Twig lives in a
small town
called Sidwell with
her mother and
brother in a house
that has belonged to
their family for years.
Twig’s family suffered
a curse many years
earlier at the hands of
a witch who, at the time, lived in a
cottage nearby. The curse takes away the
freedom of men born into the family and
leaves them outcast from society. Having
suffered this fate, Twig’s brother is a
secret kept from the rest of the town. He
is homeschooled and kept indoors his
whole life. But his safety is jeopardised
when the infamous Sidwell monster
starts to strike around town, stealing and
graffitiing buildings in protest against the
impending development of the Sidwell
woods – a development that could ruin
the town forever. As the townsmen begin
to call for the death of the monster, Twig
starts to worry that the monster could
reveal her brother’s existence and so she
becomes determined to find it. With help
from a new friend who has moved into
the old witch’s house, Twig will not only
uncover secrets she didn't know existed,
but possibly wreck her family’s lives
forever.
Nightbird is a magical fairytale of
love, betrayal and friendship perfect for
middle fiction readers looking to move
into young adult fiction. Ages 11 and up.
Katherine Dretzke is from Readings Hawthorn
PLAYLIST FOR THE DEAD
Michelle Falkoff
Here’s what Sam
knows: there was a
party. There was a
fight. The next
morning, his best
friend, Hayden, was
dead. And all he left
Sam was a playlist of
songs, and a suicide
note: For Sam – listen
and you’ll understand. As he listens to
song after song, Sam tries to face up to
what happened the night Hayden killed
himself. But it’s only by taking out his
earbuds and opening his eyes to the
people around him that he will finally
be able to piece together his best
friend’s story.
FIVE THINGS THEY
NEVER TOLD ME
Rebecca Westcott
Puffin. PB. $14.99
It’s summer, and Erin
and Martha are both
stuck at Oak Hill
Home for the Elderly.
Erin is fed up – she
doesn’t want to spend
the summer helping
out in an old people’s
home. Martha is even
more angry – she doesn’t want to be
living in the home and she can’t make
herself understood at all. Misunderstood
and feeling ignored by everyone, they are
equally frustrated by the situation. But
as Erin learns to listen to Martha, she
discovers some very important lessons
about making her own voice heard.
SHADOW SCALE
Rachel Hartman
Corgi. PB. $19.99
As Seraphina travels
the Southlands in
search of the other
half-breeds to help in
the war effort, the
dragon General
Comonot and his
Loyalists fight against
the upstart Old
Guard – with the fate of Goredd and the
other human countries hanging in the
balance. This is the gripping sequel to the
bestselling Seraphina.
THE RITHMATIST
Brandon Sanderson
Tor. PB. $19.99
In a school for the
magically gifted, your
talent could cost you your
life. Joel is fascinated by
the magic of Rithmatics,
but few have the gift and
he is not one of them.
Undaunted, he persuades
Professor Fitch to teach
him magical theory. Joel can’t infuse his
protective lines and circles with power, or
bring his chalk-drawn creatures to life, but
he’s quick to master the underlying geometric
principles. His unique skills will soon face an
extraordinary test when top Rithmatist
students are kidnapped from his Academy.
Then people start dying. Can Joel really stop
a killer alone? As even more students
disappear, he realises he’ll need the help of
Rithmatist apprentice Melody. Together, they
must race to find clues before the killer
notices them - and takes them out too.
New Non-Fiction
Book of the Month
BAD BEHAVIOUR
Rebecca Starford
A&U. PB. Was $29.99
$24.99
This is one of the most anticipated Australian books of 2015.
Within minutes of reading, I was hooked. Rebecca Starford
writes about her experience as a fourteen-year-old at a prestigious
Melbourne school’s outdoor education campus. Rebecca was a
scholarship student – clever, obedient, but with wavering confidence
and the feeling of being an outsider. She shared a campus house for a
year with fourteen other girls, including two, Portia and Ronnie, who
were rumoured to be trouble makers. Rebecca found herself drawn to Portia, who was
confident, loud, and manipulative. When Portia sought out Rebecca’s friendship, Rebecca
was thrilled and her behaviour changed. She talked back to teachers, broke campus rules, and
was regularly in detention. Rebecca’s father was called to the campus for a meeting, and
‘This is one of the most anticipated Australian books of 2015.
Within minutes of reading, I was hooked.’
together they were told her scholarship was at risk. When the girls begin victimising another
girl, Kendall, Rebecca felt uncomfortable yet powerless. The bullying was relentless, and
culminates in some shocking events.
Starford weaves the drama of that school year with her post-school life. This is a brave
memoir as she examines her history of being enthralled by female friends with strong
personalities and how this affected her during that particular year, and later in sexual
relationships. I had expected the book to feature Starford solely as a victim of bullying
(and she does become a victim for a period when Portia inevitably turns on her) but she
demonstrates little self-pity. This is a wonderful book, and will provide great fodder for book
groups. It raises thoughtful questions about the nature of female friendships, the realities
and repercussions of bullying, and the role of schools in monitoring and maintaining student
wellbeing.
Annie Condon is from Readings Hawthorn
Biography
ONE OF US
Asne Seierstad
Little, Brown. PB. $35
This is an horrific
and tragic book;
it is an account of one
the most devastating
mass shootings in
recent history. In July,
2011, Anders Breivik
detonated a home
made bomb in front of
the Norwegian Prime
Minister’s office in Oslo killing 8 people;
he then drove out of Oslo to Utøya Island,
the site of a summer camp for the youth
wing of the Norwegian Labour Party,
where he brutally murdered 69 people,
most of whom were teenagers, before
giving himself up to police. Breivik
claimed he was a member of a
revolutionary group committed to
stopping the Islamisation of Europe and
the growth of feminism. The Norwegian
Labour Party, he argued, had been
responsible for the policies of ‘cultural
Marxism’ that were leading to the
arabisation and feminisation of Norway.
Breivik showed no remorse for his actions,
claiming they were legitimately political.
In a manifesto published online he
outlined his beliefs and his political
strategy; indeed, it was important to him
that he be captured alive as his trial was
going to enable him to put his views to a
wide audience.
Seirsted, who is also the author of The
Bookseller of Kabul, has used extensive
interviews and testimonies to create
a gripping account of Breivik and his
actions. Breivik was the son of a nurse
and a Norwegian diplomat. His parents
separated when he was young and he lived
with his bipolar mother; his father, after
a failed attempt to get custody, had little
to do with him. At an early age Breivik’s
psychologists noted his dissociative
personality and recommended treatment
which was rejected by his mother. As a
young man he joined Norway’s far right
Progressive Party but became disillusioned
when he was passed over for pre-selection
as a candidate in council elections. He
retreated to his mother’s house and
became a recluse, joining right-wing chat
rooms and playing online games World
of Warcraft and Call of Duty. Over that
time he wrote his political ‘manifesto’ and
elaborately planned his attacks. One of Us
is a chilling and harrowing book and, like
Truman Capote’s In Cold Blood, is destined
to become a classic account of evil. It
should be compulsory reading
Mark Rubbo is the Managing Director of
Readings
HELLO, BEAUTIFUL!
Hannie Rayson
Text. PB. Was $29.99
$24.99
Hannie Rayson is
one of Australia’s
most renowned and
revered playwrights for
stage and TV. Inheritance,
Hotel Sorrento and Life
after George all capture
the quintessential
contemporary Australian
voice and as a result, have enjoyed successful
seasons right across Australia and
internationally. Ironically (and luckily for
readers), Rayson was encouraged to write
this book on the back of a rejection of her
most recent play by the Melbourne Theatre
Company.
Born Helen Rayson, she called herself
Hanna Basin as a kid and that later evolved
into Hannie. She grew up in Melbourne’s
affluent suburb of Brighton, but her family
was far from the Brighton cliché. Like most
young girls who grow up wanting to be
writers, Rayson kept diaries documenting
mundane moments in her teenage life in
order to try to capture a feeling.
Peppered throughout the book are
wonderful quotes from insightful friends
and influences, including Edna O'Brien’s
take on writing quoted from an interview in
a very old Paris Review: ‘When I say I have
written from the beginning, I mean that
all real writers write from the beginning,
that the vocation, the obsession, is already
there, and that the obsession derives from
an intensity of feeling which normal life
cannot accommodate.’
Hello, Beautiful! is bursting with witty
anecdotes from Rayson’s childhood and
intelligent insights into, among other
things, leaking, balding men, step families,
graffiti, awkward dinner-party moments
and giving birth in the middle of the
historic Victorian nurses’ strike in 1986.
Rayson writes with warmth and candour
about the extraordinary moments in
everyday life, such as her appreciation
of soup: ‘Soup is like a best friend. Most
people are not looking for capriciousness
or unpredictability in their chums. Most
of us want a hearty and velvety friendship,
characterised by comfort and intimacy,
trust, worthiness and contentment.’
I share Rayson’s love of the Mornington
Peninsula’s beaches and the familiar
Carlton haunt of Tiamo – and its famous
minestrone soup on cold and rainy days
when the restaurant windows fog up and
the air is thick with garlic and parmesan.
Reading Rayson's memoir nourishes your
soul and draws you, like an old friend, into
her personal and creative world. I encourage
you to enjoy this with a glass of wine (or
hearty bowl of soup) on your couch!
Emily Harms is the Head of Marketing and
Communications for Readings
PASSING CLOUDS
Graeme Leith
A&U. PB. $32.99
Electrician, Italophile and
jack of all trades, Graeme
Leith joined the famously
innovative Pram Factory
theatre and said, ‘Let
there be light.’ And there
was: Graeme Blundell,
Jack Hibberd, Max Gillies
and many others
produced over 140 new Australian plays in
ten years. Then, after stints in Britain and
Italy, Graeme and his partner Sue Mackinnon
established a successful vineyard in Victoria’s
spa country. Not long after, tragedy struck. In
1984 Graeme’s daughter and her boyfriend
vanished en route to New South Wales. Ten
days later their ute was found in Kings Cross,
where it had been abandoned by their killers.
Passing Clouds tells of a life fully lived – a life
of triumph and disaster, of joy and tragedy, of
ingenuity and sheer hard work and, above all,
an unquenchable optimism.
BEING THERE
David Malouf
Knopf. PB. $29.99
After exploring the ideas
of home in A First Place,
then what it means to be
a writer and where
writing begins in The
Writing Life, David
Malouf moves on to
words and music and art
and performance in
15
Being There. With pieces on the Sydney
Opera House, responses to art, artists and
architects, and including Malouf’s
previously unpublished libretti for Voss
and a translation of Hippolytus, this is a
stimulating collection of one man’s
connection to the world of art, ideas
and culture.
THE COUNTRY WIFE
Anne Gorman
Bantam. PB. Was $34.99
$29.99
When she is five, Anne
Gorman’s family
disintegrates. After
thirteen pregnancies
and the death of two
children, her devout
Catholic mother has a
breakdown and Anne
and her sisters are
placed in a convent. Struggling to survive
a childhood marred by fear and
uncertainty, Anne sees education as her
lifeline to freedom. After graduating from
university, she’s set to take on the world.
But her plans come unstuck when she falls
in love. Marrying a farmer and becoming a
mother of five was a life she never
imagined. Yet in this alien landscape she
finds love and a sense of belonging. When
her husband becomes gravely ill, Anne has
to find the courage to keep the farm and
her family afloat.
H IS FOR HAWK
Helen MacDonald
Vintage. PB. $22.99
As a child, Helen
Macdonald was
determined to become a
falconer, learning the
arcane terminology and
reading all the classic
books. Years later, when
her father died and she
was struck deeply by
grief, she became
obsessed with the idea of training her own
goshawk. She bought Mabel on a Scottish
quayside and took her home to Cambridge,
ready to embark on the long, strange business
of trying to train this wildest of animals. H is
for Hawk is an unflinchingly honest account
of Macdonald’s struggle with grief during the
difficult process of the hawk’s taming and her
own untaming. This is a book about memory,
nature and nation, and how it might be
possible to reconcile death with life and love,
now out in paperback.
LEILA’S SECRET
Kooshyar Karimi
Viking. PB. $32.99
Born in an Iranian slum
to a Muslim father and
a Jewish mother,
Kooshyar Karimi has
transformed himself
into a successful
doctor, an awardwinning writer, and an
adoring father. His
could be a comfortable
life but he is incapable of turning away the
unmarried women who beg him to save
their lives by ending the pregnancies that, if
discovered, would see them stoned to
death. One of those women is 22-year-old
Leila. Beautiful, intelligent, passionate, she
yearns to go to university but her strictly
traditional family forbids it. Kooshyar has
rescued countless women, but Leila seeks
his help for a different reason, one that will
haunt him for years afterwards and inspire
an impossible quest from faraway Australia.
16
Australian Studies
QUARTERLY ESSAY 57,
DEAR LIFE: ON CARING
FOR THE ELDERLY
Karen Hitchcock
Black Inc. PB. $22.99
Doctor and writer Karen
Hitchcock explores the
humane treatment of the
elderly and dying, with
honesty and deep
experience. She looks at
end-of-life decisions,
acute care of the frail
and the demented, big
pharma, over-treatment and attitudes to
ageing and death. Hitchcock reveals a
creeping ageism, often disguised, which
threatens to turn the elderly into a ‘burden’
– difficult, hopeless, expensive and
homogenous. She argues that we are justly
seeking ways to determine when medical
care may be futile, harmful or against a
patient's wishes, but this can easily morph
into limitations on care that suit the system
rather than the patient.
THE STORY OF
AUSTRALIA’S PEOPLE:
VOLUME 1
IN MANCHURIA
Michael Meyer
Journalist Michael
Meyer spent three
years living in his
in-laws’ village of
Wasteland, which,
despite the name, turns
out to be a lively place.
With delightful
character sketches and
casual but sharp-eyed
reporting, he tours Manchuria’s historical
sites and stilted museum exhibitions, while
recounting its tumultuous past as a
battleground fought over by Japan, Russia,
and Chinese Nationalists and Communists.
He gives a vivid snapshot of China’s far
northeastern region of Manchuria and
observes in Wasteland a quieter upheaval as
the town is gradually taken over by an
agribusiness that wants to move farmers
off the land and into apartment complexes,
a development that promises advantages
while threatening to unravel the social fabric.
Cinema
THE GRAND BUDAPEST
HOTEL
Viking. HB. Was $50
Abrams. HB. $45
Cultural Studies
SO YOU’VE BEEN
PUBLICLY SHAMED
Jon Ronson
Picador. PB. Was $29.99
$24.99
From the author of The
Psychopath Test comes a
captivating exploration
of one of our world’s
most underestimated
forces of social control:
shame. For the past
three years, Jon
Ronson has travelled
the world meeting
recipients of high-profile public shamings.
The shamed are people like us – people
who, say, made a joke on social media that
came out badly, or made a mistake at work.
Once their transgression is revealed,
collective outrage circles with the force of
a hurricane and the next thing they know
they’re being torn apart by an angry mob,
and sometimes even fired from their job.
We are defining the boundaries of
normality by ruining the lives of those
outside it.
BJÖRK: ARCHIVES
Klaus Biesenbach (ed.)
T&H. HB. $80
Designed by top design
studio M/M (Paris) this
is a celebration of the
multi-talented
performer Björk to
accompany the
exhibition at The
Museum of Modern Art.
It comprises six parts:
four booklets, a paperback and a poster,
each booklet contains illustrated texts by,
respectively, Klaus Biesenbach, Alex Ross,
Nicola Dibben and Timothy Morton, while
the poster features artwork of Bjork’s
albums and singles. The main book focuses
on her seven major albums, accompanied
by photographic documentation of
performances, costume and fashion, and
poetic texts by long-time collaborator Sjón.
THE NEW ARTISANS II
Olivier Dupon
T&H. HB. Was $55
Matt Zoller Seitz & Anne Washburn
The vast, ancient land of
Australia was settled in
two main streams, far
apart in time and origin.
The first stream of
immigrants came ashore
some 50,000 years ago
when the islands of
Australia, Tasmania and
New Guinea were one.
The second began to arrive from Europe at
the end of the eighteenth century. Each had
to come to terms with the land they found,
and each had to make sense of the other. It
was not - and is still not - an easy relationship,
and the story of Australia’s people is as
complex as it is rich. The Story of Australia’s
People is the first installment of an ambitious
two-part work.
with Margaret Snowdon
A&U. PB. $29.99
Geoffrey Blainey
$44.99
Art & Design
$39.95
This one-volume
companion to The Wes
Anderson Collection is
the only book to take
readers behind the
scenes of The Grand
Budapest Hotel with
in-depth interviews
between Anderson and cultural critic and
New York Times bestselling author Matt
Zoller Seitz. Anderson shares the story
behind the film’s conception, the wide variety
of sources that inspired it–from author Stefan
Zweig to filmmaker Ernst Lubitsch to
Photochrom landscapes from turn-of-thecentury Middle Europe –personal anecdotes
about the making of the film, and many other
reflections on his filmmaking process. These
interviews are accompanied by behind-thescenes photos, ephemera, and artwork.
Psychology
CREATURES OF A DAY
AND OTHER TALES OF
PSYCHOTHERAPY
Irvin D. Yalom
Scribe. PB. $27.99
In his long career, Irvin
D. Yalom has pressed
his patients and readers
to grapple with life's
two greatest
challenges: that we all
must die, and that each
of us is responsible for
leading a life worth
living. In Creatures of a
Day, he and his patients confront the
difficulty of these challenges. Yalom not
only gives us an enthralling glimpse into
their personal desires and motivations but
also tells us his own story as he struggles
to reconcile his emotional life with the
demands placed on him, and reckons with
his own life's inevitable end. Creatures of a
Day lays bare the necessary task we
eachface, each day, to make our own lives
meaningful.
$45
In this follow-up
volume to The New
Artisans, Dupon
continues his
exploration of the most
creative artisans
working today. This
new volume showcases
60 new artisans producing collectable
one-of-a-kind objects using a variety of
materials and techniques including
textiles, ceramics, paper, furniture,
glass-blowing, jewellery, metal-smithing,
and more. There is also a directory of
objects and over 700 colour illustrations.
PARIS STREET STYLE
Isabelle Thomas & Frederique
Veysset
Abrams. PB. $29.99
With their signature,
opinionated sense of
style, Thomas and Veysset
explore the significance
of the shoe as fashion
icon and its deeply
French origins, providing
expert advice on the
selection and upkeep of footwear as well as
perfect outfit pairings. The authors
incorporate history, contemporary
commentary from Inès de la Fressange,
Christian Louboutin and others, offer
inspiration on shoes for every occasion, and
conclude with a Paris shopping guide.
BRICK
William Hall
Phaidon. HB. $59.95
This is a surprising
look at one of the
world’s most versatile
and popular architectural
building materials,
through 169 structures
dating from 2,100 BC to
the present day, from the Ziggurat of Ur to
Alva Aalto, Mies Van der Rohe, Frank Gehry,
Kazuyo Sejima and many others. Illustrated
with extraordinary photographs, each
project includes an extended commentary
on the building, while an essay by the
historian and BBC television presenter Dan
Cruickshank sketches the fascinating history
of this enduring building material.
GODS & KINGS
Dana Thomas
Allen Lane. HB. $39.99
Acclaimed journalist Dana
Thomas explores the
major impact Alexander
McQueen and John
Galliano have had on the
fashion scene – they shook
the establishment out of its
bourgeois, minimalist
stupor with daring, sexy designs. They
turned out landmark collections in
mesmerising, theatrical shows that
retailers, critics and designers still talk
about. They helped luxury fashion evolve
into a $280 billion industry. In telling their
story, Thomas examines the revolution that
transformed high fashion over the last two
decades – and the price it demanded of
those who saved it.
MEMENTO MORI
Paul Koudounaris
T&H. HB. $75
From Bolivia’s ‘festival
of the little pug-nosed
ones,’ where skulls are
festooned with flowers
and given cigarettes to
smoke, to naturally
preserved Buddhist
monks and on to
Europe’s great
ossuaries, Memento Mori defies taboo to
demonstrate how the dead continue to be
present in the lives of people everywhere.
WAGSTAFF
Philip Gefter
Liveright. HB. $44.95
Sam Wagstaff emerges as a
cultural visionary in this
groundbreaking biography.
Even today, remembered
primarily as the mentor
and lover of Robert
Mapplethorpe, Wagstaff
had an incalculable and
largely overlooked influence on the world
of contemporary art and photography, and
on the evolution of gay identity in the latter
part of the 20th century. He was responsible
for the first museum show of minimal art,
and an early supporter of Mapplethorpe,
Tony Smith, Andy Warhol and Richard
Tuttle among many others. Philip Gefter’s
absorbing biography provides a searing
portrait of New York just before and during
the age of AIDS.
FURNITECTURE
Anna Yudina
T&H. HB. $35
A new wave of objects
ranging from
furniture to smallscale architectural
inventions is
transforming our
interior spaces.
Boosted by digital design and
manufacturing possibilities, a rising global
group of independent ‘makers’ is turning
this crossover of furniture and architecture
into one of the hottest and most innovative
fields of design. Furnitecture presents some
two hundred examples of this new design
typology, by renowned architects and
designers from around the globe, including
Danish studio KiBiSi’s design for a
reconfigurable bookshelf system, Japanese
architect Shigeru Ban’s moving boxes
within rooms and Dutch designers
Makkink & Bey’s conversational Ear Chairs.
Food & Gardening
with Chris Gordon
MY ABUELO’S MEXICAN
FEAST: A LIFE AND LOVE
OF MEXICAN FOOD
Daniella Germain
Hardie Grant. HB. $35
Like so many cookbooks
now, this collection of
recipes is more than a
manual: it is an homage
to a family that celebrates
history and each other.
Dotted throughout the
comprehensive guide to
authentic Mexican food (I’m not talking
strictly tacos here) are photos and snippets of
Mexican family life through the generations.
Rather than photos of food, there are sweet
illustrations to represent each dish. Some
illustrations are more successful than others.
(I do think drawing pulled fish for example
would be difficult.) The recipes, though, are
delicious. My family have a new love: ceviche
(marinated fish) and hot flower soup (chicken
soup, really). All are easy to follow, have
obtainable ingredients and are wildly suitable
for our climate, our quest for fresh tastes and
our devotion to street food for every day.
THAT SUGAR BOOK
Damon Gameau
PanMac. PB. $34.99
Let’s take stock of what
we already know: too
much sugar is not good
for you, mentally or
physically. Gameau’s
book, in a similar vein
to Super Size Me, has
researched what
happens when we take
40 teaspoons of sugar a day. Why 40
teaspoons? This is the average amount that
the average Australian consumes ... and it’s
all hidden in everyday food with fun labels
such as ‘low fat’, ‘energy’, or ‘light’. After 60
days Gameau is fat, moody and unwell. This
is a terrific book and is a firm kick up the
backside for us all about being complacent
with our food sources. It is not dictatorial or
condescending, but it is shocking. It’s a quirky
book full of sensational graphics and
information. Every high school should be
aware of this book. Highly recommended.
Oh, and there are recipes – good ones, too.
And don’t forget to check out the movie about
it all as well: That Sugar Movie.
TAKING YOU HOME:
SIMPLE GREEK FOOD
FOR FRIENDS AND
FAMILY
Helena Moursellas & Vikki
Moursellas
Hachette. PB. $39.95
I love Greek food so this
book already had me at
the title. I love the
simplicity and the
generous, relaxed feel
of Greek dishes. This
book, created by two
young local women –
identical twins and contestants from 2014’s
My Kitchen Rules – is terrific. There are all
the classics one could expect: dips, olives,
lamb, salads, but also gems like slow-roasted
pork belly. Each recipe is accompanied by a
personal story and photos from their own
family, which makes this book delightful. It’s
easy, accessible and it screams Melbourne.
Perfect for novice chefs, those who have just
moved into their own home and for those
17
home chefs who need a little reminder that
food for a crowd need not be complicated.
Come and meet Helena and Vikki as I chat
with them about all things lemon, oregano
and garlic, and about being in the spotlight.
See page 5 for the event details.
MR WILKINSON’S
SIMPLY DRESSED
SALADS: A COOKBOOK
TO CELEBRATE THE
SEASONS
Matt Wilkinson
Hardie Grant. HB. $49.95
This is a beautifully
presented book filled
with glorious recipes
fresh from the garden
plot, with a little extra
spruce here and there.
An example of this
extra flourish is what
Wilkinson does with
the humble watermelon: cube it and then toss
it with feta and prawn vinaigrette – now it’s
suitable for a dinner party of the highest
order. The book is divided into seasons, has
practical advice on what to do with leftovers,
how to make dressings and cordials from
scratch and has glorious photos that show
what your salad dish could look like. Despite
his British heritage, Wilkinson has pulled
together a book for our Australian climate
that celebrates fresh, obtainable produce and
meal time. Fans of Pope Joan will already be
familiar with some dishes, but here is your
opportunity to bring those tastes home. This
is a terrific cookbook and, I would think,
essential for any home chef’s collection.
BITTER: A TASTE OF
THE WORLD’S MOST
DANGEROUS FLAVOUR,
WITH RECIPES
M
ichele Gierck finds herself
suddenly thrust into the
role of primary carer, with no map
to navigate the world of aged care
and medical bureaucracy. The
relationship between the spirited,
determined 88-year-old protagonist
and her daughter is at times
difficult, yet always respectful and
loving, warm and upbeat. Together
they must develop practical coping
strategies, draw on a lifetime with
each other and hold onto their
sense of humour. Michele Gierck
offers wisdom and very practical
advice about two of the certainties
of life – change and loss.
w w w. n e w s o u t h p u b l i s h i n g . c o m
Jennifer McLagan
Ten Speed. HB. $54.95
Goodness I love this title
– Bitter – and the
opening chapter is too
good to be true: ‘Born to
be Bitter’. McLagan, a
Canadian food stylist,
chef, writer, historian
and champion of
neglected food sources, has created one of
the most exciting and dramatic cookbooks
I’ve seen for a long time. The photos are
explosive, and the content informative,
challenging and actually very easy if you can
find the right ingredients. Bitter greens
ravioli or bratwurst in beer for dinner
tonight followed by Campari granita? I’m in
with as much snarl and wit as I can muster.
A terrific addition to any cookbook collection.
Lena Dunham’s Girls meets Armistead Maupin’s
Tales of the City – Abigail Ulman’s debut is a striking,
fresh and pitch-perfect collection. These are frank,
funny, sometimes confronting tales about young
women trying (and occasionally failing) to come to
terms with what it means to desire, and be desired.
MasterChef favourite Amina Elshafei is blessed with
a rich family history – her mum is Korean, and her
dad is Egyptian. Join her as she takes you on a unique
culinary adventure, exploring the best cuisine from both
cultures. Amina’s mouth-watering multicultural cuisine
is a revelation – this is food to share and savour.
Spellbinding and heartbreaking, Kooshyar Karimi’s
memoir tells the true story of a young Iranian woman
for whom pregnancy means certain death. In working
to save Leila, and countless like her, Doctor Karimi risks
the lives of himself and his family.
This is the story of Galliano and McQueen, the two
working class British boys who shook fashion to its core.
With their complicated and deeply seductive designs,
they moved from the raucous art and club scene of
London to the old-school heart of French couture.
GREAT GARDEN DESIGN:
CONTEMPORARY
INSPIRATION FOR
OUTDOOR SPACES
Ian Hodgson
Frances Lincoln. HB. $49.95
English garden designer
Ian Hodgson has created a
picturesque book filled
with inspirational and
aspirational photos from
his extraordinary years of
experience. There is a
terrific amount of text with each image that is
both informative and, this is important, not
too academic. I love his chapters on ‘Outdoor
Experiences’ and ‘Gardens with a
Conscience’. There is a lot we Australian
gardeners can learn from this beautifully
presented book.
penguin.com.au
18
Baby Board Books
number of very exciting picture books in translation that
New Zealand publisher Book Island is producing.
RHYMOCEROS
Angela Crocombe is from Readings Carlton
Janik Coat
RED: A CRAYON’S STORY
Abrams. BB. $17.99
In Janik Coat’s much-anticipated
follow-up to Hippopposites, a blue
rhinoceros unabashedly demonstrates
sixteen pairs of rhyming words. His
ability to appear ‘stinky’ and ‘inky,’ or
‘caring’ and ‘daring,’ oftentimes lands
him in compromising contexts.
Fortunately, he doesn’t seem to mind.
CHILDREN’S
BOOK
FESTIVAL
2015
SUNDAY 22nd
MARCH
at State Library
Victoria and
the Wheeler Centre
10AM – 4PM
GUEST AUTHORS AND
ILLUSTRATORS:
Tristan Bancks
Davina Bell
Allison Colpoys
Terry Denton
Ursula Dubosarsky
Hazel Edwards
Nicki Greenberg
Andy Griffiths
Andrew Joyner
Marc Martin
Oliver Phommavanh
Shaun Tan
Mitch Vane
Gabrielle Wang
EVENTS INCLUDE:
Picnic Library
Meet the Authors and
Illustrators sessions
Creative workshops
Giant Book
Snuff Puppets
Peter Combe
SHAUN THE SHEEP MOVIE: TIMMY
IN THE CITY
Aardman
EVENT
PROGRAMME DETAILS:
wheelercentre.com
slv.vic.gov.au
HarperCollins. HB. $24.99
Red has a bright red label, but he is, in
fact, blue. His teacher, his mother and his
friends in the stationery cupboard all try
to help, but Red is miserable – he just
can’t be red, no matter how hard he tries.
Finally, a new friend offers a new
perspective, and Red discovers what
readers have known all along – he’s blue!
This picture book about finding the courage to be true to
your inner self can be read on multiple levels, and it offers
something for everyone.
Walker. BB. $9.95
This is a hilarious board book based
on the Shaun the Sheep movie, but told
from Timmy’s perspective! When the
Flock decides it’s time for a day out,
Timmy gets to go along to the Big City.
Many things, like automatic doors and
restaurants, are very different from
life on the farm. Other things are the same; city folk get
sheared, too, for example. This board book is the perfect
way to share the movie with Shaun and Timmy’s youngest
fans.
YOU ARE MY BABY: MEADOW
Lorena Siminovich
Chronicle Books. BB. $14.95
You are My Baby: Meadow is the latest
in this series of charming and
inventive board books. Readers will
find a little book nestled inside a
bigger book and enjoy turning the
pages to match the baby animals to
their parents. Young readers will
also learn early concepts along the way, including
animal habitats in meadows and forests.
Picture Books
MY POP IS A PIRATE
Damon Young & Peter Carnavas (illus.)
UQP. HB. $24.95
Following on from the fun and
deservedly very successful My
Nanna is a Ninja comes this companion
volume which is just as playful and
energetic. The poetry is sheer joy and
the rhythm flawless, but for me the
thing to celebrate is that the
stereotypical granddad, with his tartan slippers and
doddery, wise ways, is nowhere to be seen. The pops in this
book still have a lot of life left in them and they are
embracing it with gusto. So get your dose of pirates and
alliteration with this rambunctious picture book for all
ages, shapes and sizes.
Alexa Dretzke is from Readings Hawthorn
FREE
Michael Hall
THE RABBIT & THE SHADOW
Mélanie Rutten
Book Island. HB. $32.95
This is an unusual picture book for
readers aged between 5–8. On the
surface, it’s a gorgeous chapter book about
Rabbit, Stag, Cat, Soldier, Book and
Shadow, but the story also works as a
metaphor for the relationship between
parent and child over a lifetime. When
Rabbit appears, Stag must look after this
tiny, vulnerable creature. He loves Rabbit very much, but he
worries that Rabbit will someday leave. Rabbit runs away to
seek adventure and meets up with Soldier and Cat. They are
scared of Shadow, but Rabbit recognises Shadow when she
finally appears. Each character makes a unique journey and
each transformation is beautiful to observe.
Belgian author and illustrator Mélanie Rutten has
created an exquisite book with a decidedly European flavour
that can be read on a number of levels. This is one of a
Non- Fiction
THE STORY OF LIFE: A FIRST
BOOK ABOUT EVOLUTION
Catherine Barr & Steve Williams, Amy Husband
(illus.)
Walker. HB. $27.95
For some, evolution conjures up
images of bones and fossils – the
old, the dry and the dead. But for the
creators of The Story of Life, evolution
evokes a vibrant, colourful, joyous
world very much alive with wonder
and magic. At last we have a picture
book that illustrates the key concepts
in evolution with a visual narrative that is informative, fun
and (most importantly) accessible to young minds; this is a
book sure to pique their curiosity and encourage them to
think deeper and search further. Infused with a playful energy
and irrepressible – almost childlike – illustrations, this
delightful creation begs to be read repeatedly and there is
much in its pages to be discussed and explored. And at a time
when scientific thinking is being undermined from all sides,
The Story of Life is not just a delightful book, but an important
one as well. Highly recommended for ages 5 and up.
Athina Clarke is from Readings Malvern
DREAMS OF FREEDOM
Amnesty International
Walker. HB. $27.95
Amnesty International has
produced a stunning follow-up to
their bestseller on human rights, We Are
All Born Free (in paperback in March).
This new title, Dreams of Freedom,
focuses on freedom and has quotes from
inspiring figures, present and past,
including the Dalai Lama, Malala
Yousafzai, Nelson Mandela, Anne Frank and more. A
foreword from Michael Morpurgo states that the book’s
purpose is to inspire children to stand up for others and to
make a difference. In true Amnesty spirit, illustrators from all
over the world have added their beautiful brushstrokes to this
book. Sally Morgan represents Australia and other
contributors include Chris Riddell, Emily Gravatt, Peter Sis
and Jackie Morris. All proceeds from the book go to Amnesty.
This is an inspiring book that will spark discussion around
injustice and inequality in the world. A necessary book for
every school and public library, it also deserves a special place
in every child’s home. It can be enjoyed by children as young
as 4 when read with a parent, but readers up to 10 years old
will also enjoy engaging with it. AC
100 GREAT CHILDREN’S PICTURE
BOOKS
Martin Salisbury
Laurence King. HB. $55
This visual feast celebrates the best
designed and illustrated picture books
from around the world over the past 100
years. Each book is a creation of genius
and inventiveness, and also a mirror of
its time, reflecting art and design trends
and social concerns.
Book of the Month
THE UNDERWATER FANCY-DRESS PARADE
Davina Bell & Allison Colpoys (illus.)
Scribe. HB. $24.99
This gorgeous picture book doesn’t whack you over the head with its exploration
of social anxiety, but considers a sensitive boy’s feelings with empathy and subtlety.
Faced with the fancy-dress parade, Alfie is getting that old familiar feeling and it isn’t a
nice one. Parties, school events and other social occasions are worrying times for him and
now, even when his underwater costume of a starfish is pretty good, he can’t summon the
nerve to participate. So his mum takes him to the aquarium instead. But even there he can’t
shake the heavy feeling of failure, until he sees a little shy fish poke his nose out from the
coral and then promptly hide again and he recognises a kindred spirit.
I love that this book doesn’t come up with a neat, all-solved ending but takes you
through Alfie’s fears, nightmares and his parents’ understanding responses with a
companionable knowing. The theme is beautifully explored and Allison Colpoys’
illustrations perfectly capture his vulnerability. For ages 3–7.
Alexa Dretzke is from Readings Hawthorn
CHILDREN’S BOOK OF PHILOSOPHY
Dorling Kindersley. HB. $29.99
From Socrates and Aristotle to Kant and
Confucius, meet the thinkers and
theories that shaped our world. Find
answers to life’s big questions such as
‘Who am I?’ or ‘Should I ever tell a lie?’
Complex topics are explored in the
Children’s Book of Philosophy, inspiring
children to think about philosophical theories and concepts
for themselves.
Junior Fiction
THE DAY NO ONE WAS ANGRY
Toon Tellegen & Marc Boutavant (Illus.)
Scholastic. HB. $29.99
Lobster understands different
types of anger and can supply just
the right sort for every occasion and
situation. Sound weird to you? Well,
this is an unusual book and it examines
different animals in vexing situations
that provoke anger, or could do. Twelve
short stories contemplate anger and yet
are quite often funny, mostly
philosophical and sometimes mysterious. The book has
such a European sensibility and is a very attractive package
with Marc Boutavant’s charming illustrations but what I
think parents, children and educators will find invaluable is
that the theme is explored without moralistic finger
pointing. Anger is not looked at much in children’s
literature and The Day No One Was Angry does so in a very
original way. And my favourite animal? Well, the lobster, of
course! For ages 6 and up. AD
Middle Fiction
SON OF DEATH
Andrew McDonald
Egmont. PB. $19.95
This novel for tweens and up
strikes me as clever in several
ways. First of all, it openly tells us what
it’s about – death – because as all good
children’s authors know there’s no
pulling the wool over the eyes of their
readership, so why bother trying?
Children of this age often seek out
New
Kids’
Books
morbid topics in fiction and well-handled novels like
this can be cathartic. That said, death is not its sole
pre-occupation. The story, about a young teen who
discovers that he is descended from grim reapers and
bound by blood to be one himself, involves identity
(individual vs. family), friendship, morality, and the first
hint of romance. Yet it does all of this with a great deal of
comic-book humour, which offsets the grim subject
matter perfectly but never restricts the story from its
more thoughtful, philosophical roots. Most importantly,
the plot is fun and full of twists – some you might see
coming, others you probably won’t – and Sod (Son of
Death) is a very likeable companion for the duration.
Highly recommended for 10–13-year-olds who like
zombies, laughs and a mystery to solve.
Emily Gale is the online children’s specialist for Readings
JOHNNY DANGER: DIY SPY
Peter Millett
Puffin. PB. $14.99
When schoolboy Jonathan
Dangerfield gets mistaken for
international spy Johnny Danger he’s
both terrified and delighted. A career
as a secret agent is all he’s ever wanted
and here’s his chance! Now all he
needs to do is take down the bad guy
and foil the fart-filled evil plot. This is
an absolute giggle of a spy story, with
gross jokes a-plenty and a very sassy
sidekick in the shape of no-nonsense schoolgirl Penelope
Pounds. This will appeal to fans of Andy Griffiths and Dav
19
Pilkey and will have kids laughing their heads off as
Johnny and Penelope get into more and more trouble by
the second.
Isobel Moore is from Readings St Kilda
ZAFIR THROUGH MY EYES
Prue Mason
A&U. PB. $15.99
Zafir has a comfortable life in Homs,
Syria, until his father, a doctor, is
arrested for helping a protester who
was campaigning for revolution. While
his mother heads to Damascus to try to
find out where his father is being held,
Zafir stays with his grandmother –
until her house is bombed. With his
father in prison, his mother absent, his
grandmother ill and not a friend left in the city, will Zafir
survive long enough to be reunited with his parents?
DREAMSNATCHER
Abi Elphinstone
Twelve-year-old Molly Pecksniff wakes
one night in the middle of the forest,
lured there by a recurring nightmare –
the one with the drums and the rattles
and the masks. The Dreamsnatcher is
waiting. He has already taken her
dreams and now he wants her life –
because Moll is more important than
she knows. Suddenly everything is at
stake, and Moll is drawn into a world full of secrets,
magic and adventure.
Classic
ALICE’S ADVENTURES IN
WONDERLAND
Lewis Carroll & Anthony Browne (illus.)
Walker. HB. $27.95
The story of Alice and her
remarkable adventures in
Wonderland has enthralled
generations of children since it was
first published in 1865. Lewis
Carroll’s timeless masterpiece, now
150 years old, is richly visual in its
telling and in this beautiful
anniversary edition, Anthony Browne’s
dazzling illustrations are perfectly
paired with the surreal quality of Carroll’s writing.
Classic of the Month
MY PLACE
Nadia Wheatley & Donna Rawlins
Walker Books. PB. $19.95
My Place’s importance in
introducing Australian history
to children has already been firmly
established in the 27 years since its
publication during the bicentenary,
including its adaptation for
television and inclusion in countless
school curriculums. There is real joy
though to be found in returning to the book itself.
Narrated by the children who inhabit a particular house
in what is now inner city Sydney, My Place moves
backwards in 10-year increments starting with Laura in
1988 and finishing in 1788 with Barangaroo. Each double
page brings a new decade, a new child, and, the most
fun, a new map. Each map represents the narrators view
of their place and the differences from map to map are
startling and exciting. As the original back cover blurb
proclaimed, My Place is a time machine, a way back to
the pleasures to be found in a shared picture book.
Marie Matteson is from Readings Carlton
20
ALICE SPRINGS
BRUCE
Eleanor Hogan
Peter Ames Carlin
HB. Was $29.99
PB. Was $37.95
Now $12.95
Now $11.95
Alice Springs is a
town of extremes and
contradictions: searingly
hot and bitterly cold, thousands of
miles from anywhere, the heart of black
Australia and the headquarters of the
controversial NT Intervention. It is the
gateway to the red centre, but relatively
few Australians have been there. Eleanor
Hogan’s Alice Springs reveals the texture
of everyday life in this town through the
passage of the local seasons.
THE
SPOTTER’S
GUIDE TO
URBAN
ENGINEERING
Claire Barratt & Ian
Whitelaw
PB. Was $29.95
Now $11.95
The Spotter’s Guide to Urban Engineering
is an exciting guide to the technology
that underpins modern life. Richly
illustrated, it celebrates the wonders of
science, engineering and technology in
the modern world. Each chapter explores
the developments and various engineering
features and structures, detailing what they
are, what they do, how they do it, and, most
importantly, how to identify them.
FEAR OF
FLYING
Erica Jong
HB. Was $39.95
Now $12.95
Originally published in
1973, Erica Jong’s Fear of
Flying, the internationally
bestselling story of Isadora Wing, coined
a new phrase for a sex act and launched
a new way of thinking about gender,
sexuality, and liberty in our society. This
40th anniversary edition includes a new
introduction by Jennifer Weiner.
PILGRIMAGE
Annie Leibovitz
HB. Was $79.95
Now $24.95
Pilgrimage took worldrenowned photographer
Annie Leibovitz to places
that she could explore with no agenda.
The work became more ambitious as she
discovered that she wanted to photograph
objects as well as rooms and landscapes. She
began to use more sophisticated cameras and
a tripod and to travel with an assistant, but the
project remained personal.
TRANSPORT:
AN AUSTRALIAN
HISTORY
Robert Lee
PB. Was $49.95
Now $15.95
From the saddle horse to the motor car, the
cheap tram to the paddle-steamer, and the
express train to the modern jet aircraft, this
account chronicles the fascinating history of
transportation in Australia. From Indigenous
people journeying by foot or in canoes to
European settlements and technologies
influencing the means of travel, this lavishly
illustrated record interweaves facts and
anecdotes to portray the development of
transport Down Under.
For more than four
decades, Bruce Springsteen
has reflected the heart
and soul of America with a career that
includes 20 Grammy Awards, more than
120 million albums sold, two Golden Globes,
and an Academy Award. In Bruce, acclaimed
music writer Peter Ames Carlin presents a
startlingly intimate and vivid portrait of a
man who managed to redefine generations
of music.
THE LOST
BATTLES
Jonathan Jones
HB. Was $59.95
Now $16.95
One of Britain’s most
respected and acclaimed
art historians recounts the Renaissance
artistic competition between Leonardo
da Vinci and Michelangelo to paint the
legendary ‘lost’ masterpieces ‘The Battle of
Anghiari’ and ‘The Battle of Cascina’ on the
wall of the Palazzo Vecchio – a competition
which led to the recognition, for the first
time, of artists as godlike creators of the
‘new,’ a notion that still holds true today.
ON RARE
BIRDS
Anita Albus
HB. Was $44.95
Now $15.95
In this
gorgeously
illustrated book, Anita
Albus recounts the sad
histories of several
extinct bird species,
including the
passenger pigeon, the
Carolina parakeet,
and the great auk. She
gives a detailed account
of a variety of rare birds,
and considers unique
birds such as the laughing
kookaburra. Combining natural
history and investigative reporting, the
book weaves in mythological and cultural
material, and, most of all, tells a compelling
story.
dramatically alter the shape of the British
monarchy. Drawing on letters, diaries and
memoirs, Helen Rappaport offers a new
perspective on this compelling historical
psychodrama – the crucial final months
of the prince’s life and the Queen’s
subsequent retreat from public view.
TELEGRAPH
AVENUE
Michael Chabon
PB. Was $29.99
Now $12.95
As summer in Oakland,
California, draws to a
close, Archy Stallings
and Nat Jaffe are hanging in there, coregents of Brokeland Records. When a
former star quarterback announces plans
to dump his latest Dogpile megastore on
Telegraph Avenue, Nat and Archy fear the
worst for their little enterprise. Meanwhile,
their wives, Aviva and Gwen, a pair of
legendary midwives, find themselves
caught up in a professional battle that tests
their friendship.
ANTONIO
AND LUCIA
Riccardo Momesso
HB. Was $49.99
Now $13.95
Riccardo Momesso’s
parents, Antonio and
Lucia, moved from Calabria to Australia
in the 1950s, bringing their cooking
traditions with them – foraging, hunting,
fishing, preserving and, most importantly,
the tradition of sharing food with
family and friends. With
gorgeous imagery and
90 authentic recipes,
Antonio and Lucia is
an accessible journey
to the heart of the
rich cuisine and
culture of Calabria.
Bargain
Table
THE MARRIAGE
PLOT
Jeffrey Eugenides
HB. Was $54.99
Now $15.95
One of the best-selling
and most highly regarded
novels of 2011. Madeleine Hanna is writing
her thesis on Jane Austen and George Eliot
– authors of the great marriage plots. As
Madeleine studies the age-old motivations
of the human heart, real life, in the form
of two very different men, intervenes. But
as all three leave college, they will have
to figure out how they want their own
marriage plot to end.
MORANTHOLOGY
Caitlin Moran
PB. Was $29.99
Now $10
The follow-up to
Caitlin Moran’s
breakout hit, How
to Be a Woman,
Moranthology
showcases a hilarious
collection of awardwinning columns.
Moran ruminates
on, and sometimes
interviews, subjects as varied as caffeine,
Keith Richards, Ghostbusters, Twitter,
transsexuals, the welfare state, the
royal wedding, Lady Gaga, and her own
mortality, to name just a few. With her
unique voice, Moran brings insight and
humour to everything she writes.
FOREVER
RUMPOLE
John Mortimer
HB. Was $39.95
A MAGNIFICENT
OBSESSION
Helen Rappaport
HB. Was $49.95
Now $12.99
After the untimely
death of Prince Albert,
Queen Victoria and her
nation were plunged into a state of grief
so profound that this one event would
Now $16.95
John Mortimer died
in 2009, but will never
be forgotten. Mortimer took up the
pen while still a practicing barrister,
and the rest is literary history. Forever
Rumpole brings together fourteen of
Rumpole’s most entertaining adventures,
together with an unfinished fragment of
a new story. Rumpole is never less than
delightful and this collection is a fitting
tribute to an indelible character and his
remarkable creator.
LA CUCINA
ITALIANA
HB. Was $79.95
Now $25
With more than 3,000
step-by-step photographs for over 500
recipes, this veritable encyclopedia guides
you through all the essential building
blocks of Italian cooking. La Cucina Italiana
puts ingredients first, explaining the
different types and the best use of each, and
supplying multiple methods for preparing
those ingredients, ranging from simple to
complex. Suitable both for beginners and
more advanced chefs who want to perfect
their techniques.
YEAR OF
WONDERS
Geraldine Brooks
PB. Was $19.99
Now $12
This is the story of a
young woman’s struggle
to save her family and her
soul during the extraordinary year of 1666,
when plague struck a small Derbyshire
village. At just 18, Anna Frith must
contend with the death of her family, the
disintegration of her society, and the lure of
an illicit attraction. Geraldine Brooks’ novel
explores love, fear and fanaticism, and the
struggle of 17th century science to deal with
a diabolical pestilence.
HOW PROUST
CAN CHANGE
YOUR LIFE
Alain de Botton
HB. Was $24.99
Now $12.95
Renowned philosopher
Alain de Botton transforms Proust’s life and
work into a modern, no-nonsense guide
to topics such as enjoying your vacation,
reviving a relationship, avoiding clichés, first
dates, being a good host and recognising
love. De Botton finds inspiration in Proust’s
essays, letters, and fiction and draws out a
vivid and clarifying portrait of the master
from between the lines of his work.
FOOD SAFARI
Maeve O’Meara
PB. Was $39.95
Now $12.95
Food Safari takes the
reader on an adventure
into 34 diverse and
fascinating cuisines by
exploring the basic ingredients of each
cuisine and how to shop for them, and
making the exotic familiar. Offering simple,
foolproof recipes that anyone can cook at
home, it is a delicious journey into cultures
as far flung as Africa, Europe, Asia, North
and South America and the Middle East.
ROME
Robert Hughes
HB. Was $59.95
Now $19.95
One of our greatest art and
cultural critics now takes on
Rome’s complicated history
as a city, an empire, an origin of Western art
and civilisation, and as his own inspiration.
From his own arrival in Rome in 1958, as
a wide-eyed 20-year-old from Australia,
this authoritative, searingly smart history
sees Hughes blissfully plunging into the
life of the city, his exhilaration and life-long
passion for the place palpable on the page.
New Film & TV
with Lou Fulco
DVD of the Month
charts the rocky terrain of childhood like no
other film has before. Snapshots of adolescence
from road trips and family dinners to birthdays,
graduations and all the moments in between
create a nostalgic time capsule of the recent past
and an ode to growing up and parenting.
ADVANCED STYLE
OLIVE KITTERIDGE
$19.95
$29.95
Available 4 March
Ari Seth Cohen started his blog, Advanced Style, when he
moved to New York four years ago. Inspired by his own
grandmother’s unique personal style and the impossible-to-ignore
‘gorgeous and stylish women between 60 and death’ who were using
the broad avenues of New York as their runways, the blog took on a
life of its own. It soon evolved into the beautiful book of the same
name released in 2012 and, ultimately, a movement.
In the doco, Cohen interviews seven eccentric New Yorkers
whose eclectic personal style and spirit have had a profound impact on their approach to
ageing. Advanced Style is spilling with effervescent quotes from these ladies of fashion such
as: ‘The hats, the bags, the shoes, the jewellery, the scarves – they are my children. They
need constant attention and upkeep.’ And: ‘I’m better with age. I’m in love all the time.’ One
interviewee rides her pushbike everywhere so she can show off her outfits to everyone
she passes. As every one of her outfits incorporates some type of hat, a bike helmet cannot
possibly be worn.
These sassy New Yorkers unanimously share a disdain for the so-called ‘fashion’
featured in fashion magazines because they promote trends, and so everyone looks the
same. In contrast, these women are living evidence that there is a lot of artistic expression
to be enjoyed through fashion. For these ladies of style, fashion is about expressing their
unique style and personality as well as their creativity. They wear their personalities on
their sleeves and are obviously having fun and living life to the full while they do so. The
doco culminates with a flash-mob fashion show for 50–90 year old women at the Lincoln
Centre as part of Fashion Week. Zelda Kaplan, aged 95, faints in the front row and later
dies in hospital. It was an appropriately dramatic end to the fashionista’s life, as captured
by one of her fashionista friends: ‘She died looking great, doing what she did so well in the
streets of New York City’. What a way to go!
These fabulously inspiring characters brought tears of joy to my eyes! I loved every
minute of this doco. These women are an absolute inspiration as I approach middle age.
They live by the mantra: live life to the full, look good by expressing yourself creatively and
life can only get better ... How can anyone disagree with that?!
Emily Harms is the Head of Marketing and Communications for Readings
was nominated for the Golden Globe for Best
Musical or Comedy.
PRIDE
$39.95
Available 4 March
A rousing and warm-hearted
crowd-pleaser in the spirit of
Billy Elliot and The Full
Monty, Pride tells the
incredible true story of the
unlikely alliance between a
striking Welsh mining
community and a group of gay and lesbian
activists in 1980s Britain. Pride is the winner
of the 2014 Cannes Queer Palm award and
This Golden Globenominated miniseries tells
the story of a seemingly
placid New England town
actually wrought with
illicit affairs, crime and
tragedy, all told through
the lens of Olive (Frances McDormand),
whose wicked wit and harsh demeanor
mask a warm heart and staunch moral
centre. Spanning 25 years, the story focuses
on Olive’s relationships with her husband,
Henry, the good-hearted and kindly town
pharmacist; their son, Christopher, and
other members of their community.
THE HUNDRED-FOOT
JOURNEY
$39.95
Hassan Kadam is a culinary
ingénue with the
gastronomic equivalent of
perfect pitch. Displaced
from their native India, he
and his family settle in the
quaint village of SaintAntonin-Noble-Val in the south of France.
The village is the ideal place to settle down
and open an Indian restaurant. That is, until
Madame Mallory (Helen Mirren, in a Golden
Globe-nominated performance), the chilly
owner of upscale restaurant Le Saule
Pleureur, gets wind of it.
FOYLE’S WAR: SERIES 9
BOYHOOD
$39.95
$39.95
Available 4 March
Filmed over 12 years with the
same cast, Richard Linklater’s
Boyhood is a groundbreaking
story of growing up as seen
through the eyes of a child
named Mason, who grows up
on screen before our eyes.
Nominated for 6 Academy Awards, Boyhood
In his role as a Senior
Intelligence Officer for the
secret service, Foyle
continues to be immersed
in the dangerous world of
espionage at a time in
British history when
political and foreign governmental
relationships are delicately balanced.
TWO DAYS, ONE NIGHT
$29.95
Available 11 March
Marion Cotillard plays
Sandra, a married woman
with two children who is
made redundant when she
returns to her factory job
after hospitalisation for a
breakdown. In order to
help her, Sandra’s best friend at work has
convinced their boss to hold a vote – do the
other workers want to save Sandra’s job, or
keep their bonuses? Sandra has the
weekend to persuade her workmates to
keep her employed by sacrificing the bonus
they need to make ends meet.
MADE IN ITALY WITH
SILVIA COLLOCA
$29.95
Silvia Colloca visits three
regions of Italy that are
close to her heart –
Abruzzo, Le Marche and
Molise – to re-discover
authentic cucina povera
(peasant cuisine), meet
locals and share the true Italian secret of
cooking. In every episode Silvia meets
locals, chefs and cooks, cooking in their
kitchens and allowing viewers a peek inside.
Also coming soon
WHIPLASH (1 March)
LILYHAMMER: SEASON 2 (4 March)
UN VILLAGE FRANCAIS: SERIES 1 (11 March)
THE CONGRESS (11 March)
WATER DIVINER (19 March)
THE VILLAGE: SEASON 2 (25 March)
RECTIFY: SEASON 2 (25 March)
GALLIPOLI (25 March)
GET ON UP (26 March)
VEEP: SEASON 3 (1 April)
NIGHTCRAWLER (1 April)
INTERSTELLAR (8 April)
PADDINGTON (9 April)
Damon Gameau Brenton Thwaites Isabel Lucas Jessica Marais
THAT
FILM
21
and
Stephen Fry
Wi l l
f o re ve r
ch ange t
yo u t hi n h e way
k abou t
‘h e a l t h y
’
f o o d!
JAMIE OLIVER
From March 5
Melbourne’s home of quality arthouse and contemporary cinema
380 Lygon Street Carlton
cinemanova.com.au
22
New M us ic
Album of the Month
VESTIGES & CLAWS
José González
$21.95
Indie folk singer–songwriter and guitarist José González’s
dulcet tones first drifted over me in the back of Readings
Carlton in 2007 as he was performing a few beautiful songs from his then recently
released album, In Our Nature. González has since recorded two studio albums with
his band, Junip, and contributed to the soundtrack for The Secret Life of Walter Mitty
directed by and starring Ben Stiller. Vestiges & Claws is González’s first solo album
since 2007 and was self-produced in his homeland, Sweden.
His new album marks a shift from the renowned minimalist sound of his previous
albums and is the first of his albums to contain all original songs. As brilliant as they were,
I used to have a slight issue with the fact that Gonález was best known for his popular
covers including The Knife’s ‘Heartbeats’, Kylie Minogue’s ‘Hand on Your Heart’ and Joy
Division's ‘Love Will Tear Us Apart’.
I’m relieved that he’s now found his own voice, creating what is a beautiful album
that includes a vibrant mix of mild protest songs of frustration, moving through to peace
and optimism. This collection of eccentric folk rock, staccato grooves and rhythms is the
perfect accompaniment to a blissful sunny afternoon.
Emily Harms is the Head of Marketing and Communications for Readings
Pop
NEXT YEAR PEOPLE
Colin Hay
$24.95
Next Year People is the
work of an artist who is
a true master of his
craft. The album is full
of quizzical, curious,
cynical yet open-hearted
songs with catchy melodic hooks that
underscore deeply insightful lyrics. Some
of the songs are based on Hay’s personal
experiences such as ‘Waiting in the Rain’,
written about his parents and the almost
mystical experience he had growing up in
a music shop in Scotland, surrounded by
instruments and a constant stream of ’50s
and ’60s radio hits. Others, according to
Hay, ‘just appear from somewhere’, such
as ‘Mr. Grogan’, a dark study of a fictional
character he has been developing over
the years. The album’s title track, ‘Next
Year People,’ is a stand-out composition –
a stark but beautiful homage to the
depression-era farmers who kept going
by holding on to hope that next year
would be better.
RANGE ANXIETY
Twerps
$19.95
In March, Melbourne
pop foursome Twerps
will release their
long-awaited second
album, Range Anxiety.
Their self-titled debut
made a major splash in 2011 and saw the
band touring and playing festivals both
here and abroad. Their melodic,
bittersweet jangle-rock, influenced by the
likes of The Clean, Feelies and the
Go-Betweens, among many others, really
made a mark. Range Anxiety is a big leap
forward for the band. Again recorded
with Jack Farley, it sees singer–guitarists
Martin Frawley and Julia McFarlane
working in perfect harmony with Rick
Milovanovic and new drummer Alex
McFarlane, creating a very Australian
brand of pop rock: laconic, laidback and
with a wide sense of pastoral space.
MELBOURNE, FLORIDA
Dick Diver
$21.95
Melbourne, Florida is
Melbourne quartet Dick
Diver’s third full-length
outing, after the highlypraised New Start Again
(2011) and Calendar Days
(2013). Their latest is a wide-ranging and
diverse album, simultaneously smoother and
more eccentric than their previous worldconquering efforts. With Melbourne, Florida,
Dick Diver have really stretched out,
creating a bigger, broader Australian sound
that will undoubtedly find them a wider
audience, but it's a sound with a foot still
firmly in their musical roots (Go-Betweens,
Television, Flying Nun bands, etc.).
the new album still showcases their
grounded tradition and filmic
orchestration, but they’ve also taken on
musical flavours as diverse as those of
Spain, India, Blue Note and Trip Hop.
The album is an invitation to be free,
weightless, airborne, to transcend reality,
to enter your imagination, to raise the
possibilities above the ordinary, to
become one with nature, to give yourself
up to nature and let the wind carry you to
new places.
waited for the right opportunity to finish the
recording in the spirit Pops intended. When
she began her series of remarkable
collaborations with Wilco’s Jeff Tweedy,
starting with 2010’s You Are Not Alone and
continuing with 2013’s One True Vine, Mavis
knew she had found the person to work on
her father’s record.
Country
$21.95
TERRAPLANE
Steve Earle & The Dukes
$21.95. Deluxe CD & DVD $29.95
Terraplane is Earle's
16th studio release but,
for the man recognised
as a prime mover in both
country and Americana
circles over the past few
decades, it is also a first: his first blues
album. Terraplane takes its title from the
1930s Hudson motor car, which also
inspired the Robert Johnson song
‘Terraplane Blues’. Earle, who was raised
outside of San Antonio before migrating
to Houston, cut his teeth on a local scene
steeped in two distinct blues styles, those
of Freddy King in Fort Worth and
Lightnin’ Hopkins in Houston. He saw
both of these giants, along with Johnny
Winter, Jimmy and Stevie Ray Vaughn,
and Billy Gibbons. Their collective
influence can be heard in Earle’s
masterful song writing and The Dukes’
ragged-but-right performance.
Jazz
SOUVENANCE
Anouar Brahem
OOH YEA! THE BETTY
DAVIS SONGBOOK
Mahalia Barnes & The Soul Mates
with Joe Bonamassa
Powerhouse singer
Mahalia Barnes, one of
the most impressive
female vocalists to come
out of Australia, and her
band The Soul Mates
have teamed up with American blues-rock
guitarist Joe Bonamassa to release Ooh Yea!
The Betty Davis Songbook, an album of
Betty Davis covers exploring the tracks
from Davis's sexy, raw funk records of the
early ’70s. Betty Davis’ unique story is still
fairly unknown. She married Miles Davis in
the late ’60s, influenced him with
psychedelic rock, and introduced him to
Jimi Hendrix. Later, she released three
genre-busting albums.
Also coming soon
TRACKER
Mark Knopfler
$21.95
Available 6 March
NANNA
Xavier Rudd &
United Nations
$21.95
Available 13 March
2CD $39.95
Folk & World
LOST & FOUND
Buena Vista Social Club
$24.95
Almost two decades after
the release of the original,
Grammy-winning album,
the romance of the Buena
Vista Social Club
continues with Lost and
Found, a collection of previously unreleased
tracks, some recorded at the first legendary
sessions in Havana with producer Ry Cooder
and others during the extraordinarily rich
outpouring of music that followed. The
original Buena Vista Social Club brought
together many of the great names of the
golden age of Cuban music in the 1950s and
the album became a surprise international
best-seller and the most successful album
in the history of Cuban music.
The music of
Souvenance, by turns
graceful, hypnotic, and
taut and starkly dramatic,
was recorded in 2014 –
six years after oud-master Anouar
Brahem’s last album, The Astounding Eyes
of Rita. Brahem has noted that his
emotional world had been, for a time,
usurped by the political turmoil in Tunisia
and then beyond. A new direction is also
evident in pianist François Couturier’s
return to the Brahem group, frequently
supported by subtle string orchestrations
that glow with a transparency and fragility,
providing shimmering textures against
which the contributions of the quartet
members – and, above all, Anouar Brahem’s
unique oud-playing – stand out in bold
relief.
Blues & Soul
DON’T LOSE THIS
MOUNT THE AIR
Pops Staples
The Unthanks
$21.95
$26.95
Mount The Air is the
first studio album by
The Unthanks since Last
was released four years
ago, and they’re
releasing it on their own
label, RabbleRouser, despite offers with
major labels. Musically more ambitious,
In 1998, Roebuck ‘Pops’
Staples recorded a final
session, capping an
illustrious career as leader
and patriarch of The
Staple Singers. Unfinished
at the time of his death in 2000, the tapes
went to his daughter, Mavis, who then
SHORT MOVIE
Laura Marling
$21.95
Available 20 March
SOMETIMES I SIT &
THINK, SOMETIMES I
JUST SIT
Courtney Barnett
$19.95
Available 20 March
CAROUSEL ONE
Ron Sexsmith
$19.95
Available 27 March
New C la ss i ca l M u s i c
Classical Album of the Month
KOEHNE: TIME IS A RIVER
Tasmanian Symphony Orchestra
ABC Classics. 4811480. $24.95
I was in a terribly bad mood when I sat down to listen to this
recording. Not the best way to experience new repertoire, but
as the first track, ‘Forty Reasons to Be Cheerful’, evolved, it was like
the sun came out and my bad mood fell away. Although this ‘Festive Fanfare’ is only
six-and-a-half minutes long, the rest of the recording was equally as fulfilling and, the
only way I can truly describe it, beautiful. This is some stunningly gorgeous music.
After the bright opening we move into the gentle ‘Persistence of Memory’ with soloist
David Nuttall, principal oboe of the Tasmanian Symphony Orchestra, sharing the spotlight
with Jun Yi Ma and Sue-Ellen Paulsen. The trio deliver a soulful beginning to the work
and hearing their performance slowly dissolve into a full orchestral work is like watching a
cake bake: you can see it taking shape and know it’s going to be delicious. ‘Divertissement:
Trios Pieces Bourgeoises’ surprised me with the colours it seems to send wheeling
around the orchestra, however it’s not really until ‘Between Two Worlds’ expands over six
movements that we get some faster melodic ideas thrown into the mix. Finishing with the
title piece, ‘Time is a River’, Paul Dean compels as a soloist who works with the orchestra
as a team rather than one who hogs the spotlight. Together they make a new and beautiful
musical experience.
Each work has a different story behind its composition and a couple have been
rearranged from earlier Koehne works into new forms. The Divertissement was originally
a string quartet and ‘Between Two Worlds’ is a suite comprising music from Koehne’s
ballet ‘Fly Away Peter’. Each work’s story is interesting and distinct, but where they don’t
differ is in Koehne’s indelible style shaping every note. The soloists and the musicians of
the Tasmanian Symphony Orchestra are terrific, and with Richard Mills at the helm, this
music sings.
Kate Rockstrom is a friend of Readings
STEFFANI: NIOBE,
REGINA DI TEBE
Karina Gauvin & Philippe Jaroussky
Erato. 2564634354. 3CDs. $34.95
Just another
Baroque opera?
Agostino Steffani’s Niobe,
Regina di Tebe, based on
Ovid’s Metamorphoses,
offers a complex plot
involving gods, mortals, jealousy, and revenge.
Niobe, Queen of Thebes, declares herself
superior to the goddess Latona because she
has borne fourteen children. To avenge this
insult, the god Apollo and goddess Diana kill
Niobe’s children, and King Anfione (husband
of Niobe), seeing their lifeless bodies, kills
himself in despair. At the death of her
husband and children Niobe, weeping, turns
to stone, and her grief is so great that her
petrified eyes continue to produce tears.
Italian-born but Germany-based Steffani
offers a sumptuous score, drawing not only
on German and Italian styles, but with a
strong French influence, evident during the
overture and in the frequent use of gavotte
and minuet dance metres for the arias.
Although lengthy (almost four hours), the
singing is unfailingly beautiful and the drama
gripping, making this recording an enjoyable
and engaging listen. Soprano Karina Gauvin
(Niobe) stands out for her luscious tone and
sensitive characterisation, and countertenor
Philipe Jaroussky (Anfione) dazzles with his
virtuosic coloratura. Steffani may be obscure
compared his contemporaries, but his littleknown Niobe is so much more than just
another Baroque opera.
Alexandra Mathew is from Readings Carlton
the spiritual intensity of his musicmaking. He is also known for what he
does not do: he no longer performs with
orchestras, nor on pianos that are more
than five years old. He makes no studio
recordings and is reluctant to do
interviews. At last, after 20 years, he has
agreed to allow his recordings to be
released on CD.
JEAN-MARIE LECLAIR
Florian Deuter & Monica Waisman
Accent. ACC24298. $31.95
Leclair, who was
appointed ordinaire de la
musique du roi in the
court orchestra of Louis
XV after originally
beginning his career as a dancer and ballet
master, was considered the ‘Corelli of France’
by his contemporaries – and not without
reason. The two volumes of duos for two
violins without basso continuo introduces a
new art of violin-playing ‘à deux’, combining
the impetuosity of Italian virtuosity with the
elegance of French dance culture. The
sonatas, in which the role of melody and
accompaniment constantly alternates
between the two violins, require supreme
technical sovereignty on the part of the
instrumentalists. Two proven baroque
specialists, Florian Deuter and Mónica
Waisman, have accepted the challenges posed
by this highly virtuosic and variegated music.
MOZART: HORN
CONCERTOS & HORN
QUINTET
Pip Eastop & Anthony Halstead
Hyperion. CDA68097. $29.95
THE SALZBURG RECITAL
Grigory Sokolov
DG. 4794342. $24.95
Grigory Sokolov is
known for the
extraordinary subtlety
and endless variety of
his tone, the vast depths
of his musicianship and
Mozart’s Horn Concertos
are perhaps the most
popular works ever
written for the
instrument. This new
album is a collection of all
the works Mozart wrote for his lifelong
friend, the horn player Joseph Leutgeb
(1732–1811), one of the foremost players of
his day. In these five works Mozart
captures the public persona of an
instrument most readily associated with
all things hunting, but he also brings it
indoors: lyrical episodes, and especially
the slow movements, show the very soul
of the instrument, despite any perceived
limitations of the valveless horn.
Leutgeb’s modern successor is natural
horn player Pip Eastop, whose technical
ability and musical inventiveness are
palpable in these hugely enjoyable
renditions.
23
O SACRUM CONVIVIUM!
Andrew Nethsingha & the Choir of
St. John’s College, Cambridge
Chandos. CHAN10842. $29.95
This new recording with
the Choir of St John’s
College, Cambridge
under the direction of
Andrew Nethsingha pays
homage to French sacred choral music of
the early twentieth century. It features two
Messes solennelles, by Louis Vierne and
Jean Langlais, as well as short pieces by
Francis Poulenc and Olivier Messiaen. All
works are beautifully performed and is a
must have for all lovers of choral singing.
PIAZZOLLA: ESCUALO
Ann Hobson Pilot, Lucia Lin & J. P.
Jofre
Harmonia Mundi. HMU907627. $29.95
The name Astor Piazzolla
is synonymous with the
word tango. A musical
ambassador who carried
the signature sounds of
Argentina’s cafes and
nightclubs to concert halls around the
world, his instantly recognisable
compositions (attractively arranged here
for harp, violin and bandoneón) are infused
with elements of jazz, fusion and even
classical baroque. Escualo (1979), which
translates literally as ‘shark’, is renowned
among Piazzolla’s output for its devilish
violin part, combining virtuosic doublestopping techniques with complex
rhythmic patterns and sudden metrical
shifts that threaten to wrongfoot the
listener. All the pieces are beautifully
performed by former Boston Symphony
Orchestra harpist Ann Hobson, violinist
Lucia Lin and Argentine musiciancomposer-arranger J. P. Jofre who has been
hailed as one of the premier bandoneonista
of our time.
BROADWAY–LAFAYETTE
Simone Dinnerstein
Sony. 88875032452. $21.95
Simone Dinnerstein
celebrates the timehonoured link between
France and America
through 3 different
composers – Maurice
Ravel, George Gershwin and Philip Lasser. It
features the world-premiere recording of
piano concerto ‘The Circle and the Child’ by
Lasser (whose mother is French and father
is American) who wrote the concerto
especially for Dinnerstein in 2012. The
concerto is an amalgam of both French and
American musical sound worlds while being
based on a chorale by Bach, ‘Ihr Gestirn’, Ihr
hohlen Lüfte’ (You stars in heaven, you
vaulted sky). The title and cover artwork
refer to the New York subway station and
alludes to the French–American connection
as the Marquis de Lafayette and his French
troops helped the American colonists oust
the British during the American revolution.
From Australia
to Austria
Reinventions
Elena Kats-Chernin and
Calvin Bowman respond to
Bach and Mozart – with the
Flinders Quartet and
Genevieve Lacey.
Elegy
As World War I unleashed its
horrors, composers responded
from the heart. This 2-CD set
includes the world-premiere
recording of Australian
FS Kelly’s Elegy.
Haydn Symphonies
Christopher Hogwood
Hogwood’s most extensive
recording project among the
many he pioneered, collected in
a single Limited Edition box.
Available in April.
Pre-order NOW!

Read Readings Monthly, March 2015 here

Transcription

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