I've been working in bookshops for many years now.
Why? I love the escape offered by reading and the people who read, publish and sell books are wonderful.
Destination Saigon - Adventures In Vietnam
Walter Mason
PB $24.99
Destination Saigon is simply one of the most charming travel books I've read.
Walter Mason is a Sydney-sider who fell in love with Thang, a Vietnamese- Australian. In 1994 Thang took Walter to Vietnam and he spent his "first three days there locked in a room crying, the place terrified me so much." Then something clicked and Walter became obsessed with Vietnam and the Vietnamese. This book recounts Walter's experiences with the country and its wonderful people. Friends like Ricky, Ky and Kien allow Walter and us an intimate peek inside their lives. Kien's hair dressing salon would be worth seeking it out in Ho Chi Minh City. Walter's self deprecating humour is delightful and his anecdotes touching and eye opening as well as hilarious.
Wolf Hall
by Hilary Mantel
PB $32.99
This brilliant book is a fictionalised portrait of Thomas Cromwell. It charts his life from his humble beginnings as the son of a brutal blacksmith to Henry V111's chief advisor. He played a major role in securing Henry's divorce from Katherine of Aragon and of course was instrumental in the Reformation. It has been long listed for the Man Booker prize this year and the competition will be poorer if it's not short listed.
Mantel brings to life the man, his peers and the age.
The prose is witty and poetic and she achieves that rarely accomplished feat of tying all the threads of research into a compelling novel. There are no lists of names or bridges of facts to keep the story moving. Her characters are so well drawn that there is no struggle to keep track of the common names and titles of this huge cast of characters. Tudor England comes to life in this exploration of a man on the rise and the fulfilment of his ambitions. It's an exceptional historical novel that is all the more remarkable given how much is written about this period in history.
Small Wars
by Sadie Jones
PB $32.95
Sadie Jones won the Costa (previously The Orange Prize) for the best first novel for The Outcast. This second novel is even better.
Hal Treherne is a young and dedicated soldier on the brink of a brilliant career. He falls in love and marries the beautiful Clara and they are posted to Cyprus along with their young daughters. It's the fifties and Britain is defending its colony and this "small war" is called The Emergency.
It's brutal guerrilla warfare and as Hal becomes traumatised by his orders and the actions of his fellow soldiers his relationship with Clare becomes more distant. He struggles to keep the ugliness of the war from Clara and she pretends not to notice the estrangement. The war becomes very personal and their lives and values are turned upside down. The language is poetic simple and understated and the emotional impact on the reader is huge. To my mind she has carries the same literary weight as Pat Barker and Ian McEwan.
The Winter Vault
by Anne Michaels
April 2009
PB $32.99
It's been 11 years since Fugitive Pieces and by my reckoning that's about 22 pages a year. Frankly that sort of dilly-dallying needs to stop but it has been well worth the wait. This is an extraordinary book. It explores similar themes to Fugitive Pieces and has at its heart an exquisite love story. Michaels juxtaposes science; the jargon of botany, engineering and physics with words and exquisite phrases describing human emotions at their most intense. I don't have the words (just clichés tragically) to do justice to this book. I just savoured every word and every page.
I must share one little gem with you:
Jean reads to her husband Avery, who has insomnia,
"... from Elizabeth David, whose serene voice promising so much certain pleasure seemed to calm him. There's nothing like a good recipe to make you believe things will work out fine in the end, said Avery. Even the phrase 'Serves four' is hope distilled."
I'll stop there because I could just type the whole book.
Beyond Heaving Bosoms: the Smart Bitches' Guide To Trashy Books
by Sarah Wendell & Cindy Tan
PB $29.95
I'd like to take this opportunity to heartily recommend http://www.smartbitchestrashybooks.com whose tag is all of the romance and none of the bullshit. They have an excellent book out called "Beyond Heaving Bosoms: the Smart Bitches' Guide To Trashy Books". It talks about why romance is one of the biggest selling genres but no one admits to reading it and it is roll around the floor funny. It is quite serious lit crit too though, discussing rape in romance novels, plagiarism, the history of the genre and so forth.There are also tips on how to write a great romance but not many reading recommendations beyond the classics. You need to check their website for reviews.
To give you a taste of their sassy style, In Chapter Codpiece some of the rules for the romantic hero are thus.
"Heroes are never stupid; Betas are tough to sell; Heroes rarely travel in packs, and if they do, they come in those convenient individually packaged single-serving size packs: in a group, yet completely alone; Heroes are never soft. They are hard. Everywhere; He's an expert. At something." and much more.
My thanks to the customer who recommended this book. It was great fun.
Still Alice
Lisa Genova
March 2009
$29.95
Alice Howland is in her early fifties and as the peak of career as an eminent Professor of Psychology at Harvard University. She's fit and her relationship with her husband and grown up girls is comfortable. She's on her daily jog when inexplicably she gets lost. So begins her descent into early onset Alzheimer's Disease. The novel explores how Alice comes to terms with the diagnosis and how she tries to control the inevitable slide.
I had such an emotional response to this novel as my beloved father-in-law has Alzheimers. Whilst Alice's plight is very sad it is also oddly comforting in that eventually Alice is in a good place even though her family suffer from the loss of the "old" Alice. The author has a PhD in neuroscience from Harvard and has had a lot of experience with Alzheimer patients and so the book has a ring of truth that is reinforced by a great deal of medical information. This gives the novel authenticity but does inhibit the flow a little. A small flaw in what is a very moving novel.
The Big Blowdown
George Pelecanos
July 2007
$22.95
Quite often the attraction of crime books for me is the sense of place that is created. I can forgive CJ Box when he loses control of the plot because he transports me to Montana. I can overlook Jim Fusilli's Terry Orr wallowing in grief over three whole books because I walk the streets of New York with Terry. I love New Jersey as much as Evanovich's Stephanie Plumb and I can travel vicariously to Rankin's Edinburgh, Laura Lippman's Baltimore, Hiaasen's Florida, Corris's Sydney and James Lee Burke's South.
Pelecanos has written about 14 novels set in Washington DC. The Big Blowdown is the first in the Washington quartet which comprises King Suckerman, The Sweet Forever and Shame The Devil.
It follows the lives and friends of Pete Karras, children of first generation Greek and Italian immigrants. It's set just after the Second World War and Pete & his best friend Joey have survived and are trying to become part of a gang led by a small time hood called Burke. Burke's after a yes man and Pete not only struggles with that but can't bring himself to shake down immigrants who have worked so hard for so little. Pete is taught a brutal lesson and the injuries change his life irrevocably. Three years later Pete is working in a friend's diner and Burke's gang including his ex best friend Joey, demand protection money. That's the bare bones of the plot but there's much more depth to the characters and story. The writing style nods to noir but Pelecanos has a unique voice. Quite a lot is left unsaid, the literary equivalent of a telling glance, which is unusual amongst contemporary American crime writers. I think he's one of the best crime writers of his generation.
The Hindi Bindi Club
Monica Pradham
July 2007
$32.95
This absolutely joyful novel is a delight. It's similar in theme to Amy Tan's The Joy Luck Club except in this case it's women from India immigrating to the Unites States. It seems the conflict between mothers and their daughters and the old ways and the new are universal. There are three mothers, Meenal, Saroj and Uma and their respective daughters Kiran, Preity and Rani and each get to tell their stories in alternating chapters. It's slightly chaotic but great fun just like one of Saroj's parties. There are recipes at the end of the mother's stories which sound delicious and I'm attempting one or two today so I'll keep you posted. They have extra cooking tips from the characters which is a very sweet touch.
Meenal, Saroj and Uma come from different parts of India and they all have family there. The reader gets to travel back to Mumbai with Meenal , learn about Partition from Saroj whose family was from Lahore and had to flee to India when Lahore became part of Pakistan. Uma is from an upper middle class family and was so bright she won a scholarship to a University in Boston. Her father refused to let her go overseas and dismissed higher education for women. Without her paternal grandfather's interference she would have remained in India. Uma has an unlucky birth chart. She is a manglik which means she could jeopardise the health of her spouse and very few families are willing to wish ill health, even death upon their sons. Fortunately her American husband Patrick is also a manglik so the bad luck gets cancelled out. It's fascinating to read how such beliefs can determine a woman's fate. The mothers had all ended up in Boston when they first immigrated and have been fast friends ever since. Their daughters have affectionately dubbed them the Hindi-Bindi Club.
The daughters stories are charming as they wrestle with the culture of their parents and their peers but their journeys are internal as Kiran resorts to an arranged marriage so she can start a family, Preity confronts her secret life and Rani her schizophrenia and what that means for her life as an artist. That makes the Hindi-Bindi Club sound a little grim but the novel is so full of life and stories that these issues just add shade to the light. This is one of those novels that ruin the next few books you read as they are not going to measure up to the charm of the Hindi- Bindi Club
El Dorado
Dorothy Porter
May 2007
$32.95
I have never read anything quite like El Dorado which means I haven't read anything written by the extraordinary Dorothy Porter. I'm completely in awe of her talent as El Dorado is one of the most gripping, emotionally powerful books I've ever read. The plot is quite straightforward. There is a copper, Bill' who is trying to stop a serial killer murdering young kids. His childhood and best friend Cath is on holiday from her high powered film career in LA and tries to help. Cath and his rebellious teenage daughter, Caitlin, are the loves of Bill's life. As a small sidebar, Cath falls in love with the much younger Lily. Dum de dum de dum, so goes the plot of many crime novels.
The writing, well, oh my god! It's exquisitely paced. You will devour it and race through the thrilling bits (and it's so thrilling) and you will slow and weep through the rest. What Dorothy Porter says about love and friendship will stay with you. How she describes falling in love is exquisite. Apart from that it is just one of the best crime novels I've read. Don't be put off by the narrative verse, just read two pages and take the rest of the day off to finish it.
Measuring the World
Daniel Kehlmann
April 2007
$34.95
This is a fictionalised account of the lives of two brilliant scientists who lived in remarkable times.
The novel opens in the late 1800s when two elderly scientists meet at a conference in Berlin. Carl Friedrich Gauss is a mathematical genius and Alexander von Humboldt is a renowned explorer. He is particularly famous for a journey up the Orinoco in South America some 25 years earlier. This journey which takes up about a third of the novel is absolutely fascinating and if I didn't know it is based on a real expedition I wouldn't believe a word of it. Both men have eschewed human relationships in their hunger for knowledge. Von Humboldt was from a wealthy Prussian aristocratic family whilst Gauss was a child prodigy from a dirt poor family. This sets the up the background of political upheaval that occurs in Europe nicely. Not that our two scientists are particularly concerned about that except when it effects their funding for various projects. Some of the great thinkers of the day like Kant, Goethe and Daguerre appear in surprisingly comic cameos. This book is a huge best seller in Germany and the author is only 31 and even in translation it's a fascinating and compelling novel.
The Tenderness of Wolves
Steff Penney
March 2007
PB $22.95
The Tenderness of Wolves first won its category of "best first novel" in the UK's Costa (formerly the Whitbread) Awards and we al felt that a wise choice had been made by the judges. When it subsequently went on to win the overall Costa we were delighted. This completely absorbing novel is set in the north of Canada around the 1860s.The Hudson Bay Company's dominance in the fur trade is coming to an end as most of the animals have been hunted to near extinction.
Two settlements, Dove River and Caulfield, are peopled by immigrants who have been driven out of their homelands. A trapper, Laurent Jammet, has been murdered, scalped in his cabin. His young neighbour Francis Ross inadvertently sees the man he believes to be the killer and takes off after the suspect without telling anyone his plans. Naturally Francis falls under suspicion in the small community. Other characters with their own interests in mind, pursue the tracks in the snow left by the murder suspect and Francis.
It has everything this novel. It's a fine thriller, a love story; it has vivid descriptions of landscape and a wonderful cast of characters all deftly woven into a satisfying whole.
Quarter Tones
Susan Mann
May 2007
PB $32.95
This absolutely gorgeous, gorgeous novel is set in South Africa with side trips to London & Paris. Ana returns home after the death of her dad, Sam who raised her after the death of her mother in childbirth. As she reopens the dusty cottage memories come flooding back. Her neighbours Franz Van Der Veer and his estranged brother Daniel offer a welcome and hint at more than neighbourly regard. Her husband Michael is remote physically and emotionally, caught up in his work with aid agencies. As Ana regains her sense of self, her ability to play and connect deeply with her music (she is a flautist), emerges. The plot is unexpected. The writing is deft and the touch feather light. It's a deeply satisfying read.
Winter's Bone
by Daniel Woodrell
2006
PB $29.95
Great things come in small packages and this book is a gem. Set in the Ozark Hills where making crystal meth has replaced moonshine, 16 year old Ree has been waiting for her father to come back for days. Her mother is catatonic with an undiagnosed mental illness and she is responsible for her two young brothers. If her Dad doesn't show their house and land is forfeited to the bail bondsman. It's a cracker of a book and beautifully written.
Cross
Ken Bruen
April 2007
PB $32.95
The Cross is set in Galway and the main protagonist is Jack Taylor, ex- police or Guard. The Irish call them Garda Siochana and they are not beloved by the populace.
Jack Taylor struggles with addiction and some of Bruen's best writing throughout the series is about Jack's alcoholism and recovery. Ken Bruen torments his character unmercifully. Jack's relationships are heartbreaking, even his mother is a cold hearted cow. In one book Jack moves to London thinking a change of scene will help him give up the booze but Bruen gives him a cocaine addiction instead. These novels are black noir with a glimmer of Irish humour to relieve them. In Cross , Cody , a young man Jack considers a son, lies in a coma after taking a bullet meant for Jack. When an eighteen year old boy is found crucified and there are no leads, Jack tries to alleviate his guilt about Cody by investigating the crime. When the boy's sister is burnt alive in her car the plot thickens. The Jack Taylor series is not for the faint hearted but the quality of writing makes Bruen the most literary of the British crime writers about today. Check out www.kenbruen.com
My favourite book
One Pair of Hands
by Monica Dickens
Monica Dickens is Charles Dickens great grand daughter and was born into the upper classes. This autobiography is about her experiences between the wars as a cook and general servant. Bored with the life of a debutante she does a flash French Cooking Class in Paris and much to the horror of her family and friends goes into service as a cook general. She can do a perfect souffle (most of the time) but hasnt got a clue about kippers as she was never allowed in the kitchen ("the cooks domain") growing up. Cleaning is also a learning experience. It was unheard of for young women of the upper classes to work in those days and she certainly wasnt expected to stick it out. The family were scandalised. I have read two copies of this book to pieces and still snort with laughter. Its a fascinating world and she has a wicked eye for human foibles. She gets placed in various "situations" by the agency so we get to experience all sorts of households from a new young wife to a great estate in the country where she must invent a mysterious husband and be known as Mrs Dickens as a Miss Dickens would never get the gig. One Pair Of Feet which recounts her experiences as a trainee nurse during ww2 is also rather wonderful. Nurses did an awful lot of cleaning in those days.
My favourite author
Tim Winton
mmm this is like asking who your favourite child is - totally depends on the day. Today its a tie between Tim Winton, Richard Flanagan (new book coming later this year - yippee) Kate Grenville, (her latest novel, The Secret River, is just superb) and Jane Austen.
Tim, Kate and Richard tell great yarns that involve characters that I get emotionally involved with and learn from. I travel Australia vicariously because their sense of place is wonderful and they dont fuss with their sentences. Their books are devoured not just read. Pride & Prejudice and Persuasion I consider "therapy" and read them every year when I feel blue.
What's beside the bed
The True Story Of Butterfish by Nick Earls
A contemporary love story set in Brisbane. I've always loved Nick Earls effortless prose and natural storytelling abilities.
We Don't Live Here Anymore by Matt Nable.
My Penguin rep is raving about the quality of writing in this debut Australian novel.
The Stranger by Max Frei.
This is the first book in the Labyrinth Of Echo series. It is translated from the Russian and has sold millions of copies there. Knizhniye Retzenzizi from the Literary Review, Moscow, is quoted as saying "Be prepared. This book will permanently transform you".
The Little Giant Of Aberdeen County by Tiffany Baker
Stories of small town American life with a Southern sensibility alway appeal to me.
All Other Nights by Dara Horn.
In 2007 Dara Horn was named as one of Granta's Best Young American Novelists. I adored The World To Come and this book had a starred review in 'Publishers Weekly'. All Other Nights is about Jewish people in the American Civil War.
Jasmyn by Alex Bell
"A gripping contemporary take on fairytales and monsters". Just what my fantasy fix requires.