Many years back, when I was new to the bush, I was standing in the top paddock of a mixed grazing and cropping property backing onto to the Warrumbumble Mountains in north western New South Wales and waxing lyrical about the dramatic horizon all broken into vertical planes by weird ancient dry lava plugs.
The tart response from the farmer – an intimidatingly crusty and independent woman in her 70s – was sobering. “Good views don’t make a farm”, she said in her witheringly succinct crack of a voice.
I was reminded of that day over and over again while reading Carrie Tiffany’s luminous Mateship with Birds, which strips Australian rural life of pastiche and sentimentality, leaving us with something that is beautiful and raw with its own living, breathing energy.
Let’s get this out of the way quickly. Mateship with Birds is the kind of book that you just don’t want to end. I was left with a feeling of great sadness and loss – not because of the way the story finished, but because I was suddenly cast out of the world into which she transported me. I simply didn’t want to be cut adrift from the gentle dairy farmer, Harry, the purposeful single woman next door Betty, with her two children Michael, on the brink of sexual awakening, and Little Hazel the younger sister dealing with her own initiation into the world of nature.
Tiffany sets her novel in the sexually repressed 1950s of Victoria but her story has a universality about it that transcends time and place. It is a story about love, lust, loneliness, family, animals and the rhythms of nature. She writes with lucid clarity, bringing as much beauty to descriptions of the daily ministrations to lactating cows, to those of Harry’s observations of the viciousness of the birds that patrol the boundaries of his paddock, to the surprising and unexpected yearnings of the human heart. And let’s not forget that despite the strictures of society at the time, growing up in the country meant be surrounded by fecundity and a lot of rutting – the cycle of sex, birth, decay, death is simply an observable fact.
This is a particularly sensual novel, and in that respect, it fits very well into that bush setting. The reader feels the ooze of the soil under hoof, smells the diesel of the red Fergy in the shed, hears the plop of the milk in the pail. And when it comes to longings of a more human kind, Tiffany’s sparse and unsentimental style is both deft and poetic.
Tiffany must have done an enormous amount of research about dairying and bird life, and considering her age and background, has done an incredible job of rendering so palpable a life that she herself could never have experienced and yet lives on the memories of a great many people. She breathes air into this world with authenticity and sensitivity and I am certainly the richer for experiencing it through her imagination.
This is an exceptional novel. I can’t recommend it highly enough.
1. To begin with why don’t you tell us a little bit about yourself – where were you born? Raised? Schooled?
I was born in Halifax, England. My family migrated to Western Australia when I was six. At eighteen I went to the Northern Territory and worked as a park ranger for a few years. I now live in Victoria where I work as an agricultural journalist.
2. What did you want to be when you were twelve, eighteen and thirty? And why?
At twelve I wanted to be a jockey or a show jumper.
At eighteen I’d just started my khaki years – working as a park ranger – and it seemed a good fit for a while.
At thirty I had two young children and was busy with kinder duties and dress-ups and making pirate hats. It was engrossing and for a few years I didn’t think of anything else. I started writing in my mid thirties.
3. What strongly held belief did you have at eighteen that you do not have now?
That I would never be loved.
4. What were three works of art – book or painting or piece of music, etc – you can now say, had a great effect on you and influenced your own development as a writer?
I read Dickens when I was a teenager and I think his sympathy for people, his essential tenderness, really touched me. The South American writers like Borges and Garcia Marquez opened my eyes to the possibilities of the landscape.
More recently I’ve been reading Freud. In Mateship with Birds the character, Harry, conducts a sort of self-analysis through writing letters about his sexual history to a young neighbour. Freud claimed that his letters to his friend Fleiss (they make fascinating reading) had a similar function.
5. Considering the innumerable artistic avenues open to you, why did you choose to write a novel?
I’m not sure I can answer this. I haven’t always written, I didn’t keep a diary as a child and I was never particularly good at anything at school. I have always read a great deal though and in my mid thirties I sat down and started writing some short stories. I also make pictures, but I don’t sell them.
It is essentially a love story about the developing relationship between a middle-aged dairy farmer and his next door neighbour. Every love story is unique and I hope I’ve conveyed something about the ‘truth’ of their lives – the difficulties and obstacles that have brought them to this point. It is a small book with an intimate scale. There is sadness and loneliness and confusion (daily life!), but I hope there is humour and tenderness too.
(BBGuru: Here is the publisher’s blurb -
On the outskirts of an Australian country town in the 1950s, a lonely farmer trains his binoculars on a family of kookaburras that roost in a tree near his house. Harry observes the kookaburras through a year of feast, famine, birth, death, war, romance and song. As Harry watches the birds, his next door neighbour has her own set of binoculars trained on him. Ardent, hard-working Betty has escaped to the country with her two fatherless children. Betty is pleased that her son, Michael, wants to spend time with the gentle farmer next door. But when Harry decides to teach Michael about the opposite sex, perilous boundaries are crossed.
Mateship with Birds is a novel about young lust and mature love. It is a hymn to the rhythm of country life – to vicious birds, virginal cows, adored dogs and ill-used sheep. On one small farm in a vast, ancient landscape, a collection of misfits question the nature of what a family can be.)
7. What do you hope people take away with them after reading your work?
With Mateship with Birds I’d like them to be thinking about the nature of families, about the ties that bind us together and our relationships with animals. Perhaps also about sex and their particular ‘sexual histories.’
8. Whom do you most admire in the realm of writing and why?
9. Many artists set themselves very ambitious goals. What are yours?
I’m not sure this is actually true. It is simply about getting up each day and returning to your sentences – trying to write the cleanest, truest sentences that you can.
10. What advice do you give aspiring writers?
Just to write. Not to think about readers or publishers or marketing… to accept that it is the writing itself that matters. And to read and read and then read some more…
Posted on January 25, 2012 by John Purcell, The Booktopia Book Guru
An intrepid African safari guide sets out to discover all he can about the wildlife of the South American continent in a hilarious book about walking pumas (can be dangerous), chasing jaguars (can be elusive) and finding love (can be tricky).
Not content with regular encounters with dangerous animals on one continent, Peter Allison decided to get up close and personal with some seriously scary animals on another.
Unlike in Africa, where all Peter’s experiences had been safari based, he planned to vary things up in South America, getting involved with conservation projects as well as seeking out ‘the wildest and rarest wildlife experiences on offer’.
From learning to walk – or rather be bitten and dragged along at speed by – a puma in Bolivia, to searching for elusive jaguars in Brazil, finding love in Patagonia, and hunting naked with the remote Huaorani people in Ecuador, How to Walk a Puma is Peter’s fascinating and often hilarious account of his adventures and misadventures in South America.
Plans are usually only good for one thing – laughing at in hindsight. So, armed with rudimentary Spanish, dangerous levels of curiosity and a record of poor judgement, I set off to tackle whatever South America could throw at me – Peter Allison
‘His misadventures make Whatever You Do, Don’t Run an absorbing read … The material is rich, and Allison is a gifted storyteller.’ – National Geographic Adventures
‘Enough adventure, action, life lessons, and laughs to fill a movie and four sequels. The fact that Allison survived to write any of this down is a miracle in itself.’ – Cash Peters, author of Naked in Dangerous Places and Gullible’s Travels.
About The Author: Peter Allison has led safaris in South Africa, Botswana and Namibia. It was his love of animals that first led Peter to Africa at the age of 19, and by the late 1990s he’d graduated from being a safari guide himself to leading the training of guides for the region’s largest safari operator. Peter has led safaris that have featured in such magazines as Vogue and Conde Nast Traveller. He has also assisted National Geographic photographers and appeared on television shows such as Jack Hanna’s Animal Adventures. In between globetrotting the world as a marketeer for Africa’s leading safari company, Peter divides his time between Sydney and Cape Town.
Booktopia Book Guru says… I have read Peter’s first two books, Whatever You Do, Don’t Run and Don’t Look Behind You, But… : More Tales from an African Safari Guide and can recommend them both. If you like to laugh, and who doesn’t, then Pete’s books are for you. If you love Africa, animals and roughing it, then Pete’s books are for you. If you want to taste a life entirely foreign to your own, if you want to be wander through the wilds of Africa from the safety of your armchair, then, once again, both of Pete’s books are for you. That should about cover everyone. Now get to reading them!
The warm, funny and utterly engaging true story of a young Aussie safari guide who has spent the last twelve years leading tours in the African bush.
Peter Allison was only nineteen when he left Australia for Africa, thinking he might travel around and see a bit of the country before going home to a ‘proper job’. But Africa worked its magic, and Peter ended up falling, quickly and completely, in love with the country and its wildlife. Landing in a game reserve in the wildlife-rich Okavango Delta, he became a safari guide and, some twelve years later, his short holiday in Africa isn’t over yet.
Whatever You Do, Don’t Run is his guide’s-eye view of living in the bush, confronting the world’s fiercest animals and, most challenging of all, managing herds of gaping tourists. Like the young woman who rejected the recommended safari-friendly khaki to wear a more ‘fashionable’ hot pink ensemble, or the Japanese tourist who requested a repeat performance of Allison’s being charged by a lion so he could videotape it.
Peter Allison – like an affable, younger David Attenborough or a slightly more laid-back Steve Irwin – really knows his wildlife. He’s had some extraordinary, once-in-a-lifetime experiences. From close encounters with hungry lions, cranky elephants and over-protective honey badgers, there’s not much in the African bush that Peter hasn’t seen, done or been chased by. His affection for these wild and dangerous animals and his fascination with, and respect for, their often extraordinary behaviour is completely genuine, deep and infectious.
Reading Whatever You Do, Don’t Run is like sitting around a campfire late at night and listening to him talking – his stories of the animals and the bush are gentle, warm, funny and utterly engaging.
Another serving of campfire stories – hair-raising and hilarious tales of Africa, animals and close escapes – from Australia’s intrepid safari guide Peter Allison, bestselling author of Whatever You Do, Don’t Run.
It shouldn’t be fun to be chased by an animal that outweighs you by a factor of seventy, but Peter Allison gets an odd thrill every time an elephant charges his beaten-up jeep or a peckish crocodile looks at him sideways.
And now our favourite safari leader is back with more crazy, incredible, endearing and laugh-out-loud funny tales from his time guiding unsuspecting tourists through the African bush. By now you’d think he’d know his way around. You’d be wrong. From avoiding territorial hippos and half-starved lions to dodging landmines and getting lost on the unforgiving savanna, Peter Allison has had his fair share of close calls. Yet, despite a growing suspicion that it is trying very hard to kill him, he just can’t shake his love of this remarkable land, its animals and its people.
Drawing on his experiences in South Africa, Botswana, Mozambique and Namibia, Don’t Look Behind You, But… picks up where Whatever You Do, Don’t Run left off. If you enjoyed Peter’s first bestselling book of hilarious safari stories you’re going to love Don’t Look Behind You, But…
Posted on January 28, 2012 by John Purcell, The Booktopia Book Guru
There are few things more gratifying than discovering an author whose books seem so perfectly suited to your tastes as a reader that it feels as though they may have been written especially for you.
After devouring Sulari Gentill’sMiles Off Course in a whirlwind reading session – a reading session interrupted only by a quick break to jump online and purchase A Few Right Thinking Menand A Decline in Prophets(being the previous two installments in the Rowland Sinclair series), I knew that Sulari Gentill had made it onto my list of top ten crime writers.
Set in Australia in 1933, Miles Off Course is a lively and consistently action-packed Historical Crime novel. It could also be classified as a rollicking Outback Adventure or thrilling Spy Drama, or even a witty “fish-out-of-water” comedy, plucking a set of fashionable dilettantes from a bohemian art scene and dropping them in the rugged, rural countryside of the Snowy Mountains.
Gentill opens with the line, “Norman Lindsay is a complete and utter bastard!” and things only get better from there on in. The plot dances inventively around actual historical events and there is more than one cameo appearance made by famous Australian historical figures, one of which remains cleverly incognito until their true identity is revealed in the epilogue. Meanwhile, the historical Australian setting makes for a fascinating backdrop and will appeal to fans of Kerry Greenwood’s Phryne Fisher novels.
Like all the best crime writers, Gentill has created a brilliantly idiosyncratic protagonist in Rowland Sinclair. Fans of Dorothy L. Sayers’ Lord Peter Wimsey and Ngaio Marsh’s Roderick Alleyn will be bound to appreciate a character like Rowland Sinclair.
A well-bred and wealthy Australian gent from a privileged background, Sinclair is somewhat the black sheep of his family. A renowned painter of naked ladies (gasp!), considered by some as a protégé of Norman Lindsay, he has an unfailing talent for causing scandals and landing himself in life-threatening situations. It is this delightful combination of different roles – Gentleman, Artist, Amateur-Detective and Adventurer – that makes Rowland Sinclair such an entertaining leading man.
Like any self-respecting, wealthy eccentric, Sinclair is accompanied wherever he goes by his very own entourage of equally eccentric fellow artists – condemned by Sinclair’s older brother as a “troupe of unemployed hangers-on.”
Sinclair’s entourage is made up of three companions. Milton Isaacs – a flamboyant poet and arbiter of fashion, Edna Higgins – a beautiful and independent sculptress and Clyde Watson Jones – a painter who honed his craft as something of a wandering vagabond.
The aforementioned older brother, Wilfred Sinclair, is an influential businessman with conservative, right-wing sensibilities who cannot help but disapprove of his younger brother’s less-than-respectable lifestyle. The relationship between the two brothers is rather touching in that while they continually disagree and disappoint each other they are nevertheless very loyal and protective towards each other.
The plot opens with the disappearance of Harry Simpson, an aboriginal stock-hand who has been employed by the Sinclair family since he was a child. Both the Sinclair brothers are convinced that there is something sinister about Harry’s sudden disappearance, despite the fact that his co-workers believe he has simply gone “walkabout”. Harry is more than just an employee to the Sinclair brothers, however, and they are determined to find out what really happened to him. And so Sinclair and his entourage pile into his beloved yellow Mercedes Benz and head for the Snowy Mountains to investigate.
What follows is a madcap adventure of murder, betrayal, abduction, theft, political intrigue and a dash of romance. And just in case that doesn’t sound exciting enough to capture your interest, there is also a Communist spy conspiracy and a hunt for bushranger’s treasure.
The plot of Miles Off Course is a brightly splashed canvas, one that Gentill takes obvious delight in painting. This is the kind of book that is so fun to read that one can’t help but feel that the author must have gotten a real kick out of writing it. Little wonder then that she should write so quickly. Between the Rowland Sinclair series and her YA fantasy/adventure series, The Hero Trilogy, Gentill is releasing an average of two books a year. Which means that by far the best part about having read Miles Off Courseand discovering a new favorite author is that I can now go and devour her earlier novels, safe in the knowledge that there will be many more Rowland Sinclair adventures to come.
1. To begin with why don’t you tell us a little bit about yourself – where were you born? Raised? Schooled?
I was born in the west of Canada, high in the Rocky Mountains, in Golden, British Columbia. My father was an Anglican priest, but returned to graduate school to become first a psychologist, and then a lawyer, so we moved all over Canada following him from university to university. I went to thirteen schools, finishing at a girls’ school, the Bishop Strachan School in Toronto, Canada’s largest city; I went on to studying acting at university.
2. What did you want to be when you were twelve, eighteen and thirty? And why?
Deeply in love with the instant, intimate magic of theatre, I wanted to be an actress at twelve, an actor (fine distinction, indicating professional rigor) at eighteen—and by the time I was thirty I’d recovered from that madness and wanted to be a writer, for the more sustained spell of fiction.
3. What strongly held belief did you have at eighteen that you do not have now?
Not so much a belief as the unexamined assumption that Shakespeare and Chekhov wrote better than anyone writing here and now possibly could. It’s a malady many young people suffer from, I think, although these days an eighteen-year-old might substitute Murakami and David Foster Wallace.
4. What were three works of art – book or painting or piece of music, etc – you can now say, had a great effect on you and influenced your own development as a writer?
These are such good questions! Both music and art have had a profound effect on my thinking and writing, but if I can only list three influences, it’s all books for me: Penelope Fitzgerald’sThe Beginning of Spring, Russell Hoban’s Riddley Walker, and an obscure little novel called Miss Mole, by E.H. Young. All books that revel in language and the meticulous, delicate examination of small desperate lives and volcanic longings.
5. Considering the innumerable artistic avenues open to you, why did you choose to write a novel?
I love the long, secret, latent connection between one writer and one reader that gradually develops during the writing and then, after a pause, the reading of a novel. There is no other art form that contains time so well, and holds it suspended until the reader reads the book.
6. Please tell us about your latest novel…
The Little Shadows follows the Avery girls, Aurora, Clover and Bella, as they leap lame-footed into vaudeville life and grow in staggered, syncopated steps from babes in the woods into true artists.
(BBGuru: here’s the publisher’s blurb -
The eagerly anticipated new novel from the Commonwealth Prize winning author of the bestselling Good to a Fault follows three sisters into the backstage world of Polite Vaudeville before and during the First World War.
The Little Shadows revolves around three sisters in the world of vaudeville before and during the First World War. We follow the lives of all three in turn: Aurora, the eldest and most beautiful, who is sixteen when the book opens; thoughtful Clover, a year younger; and the youngest sister, joyous, headstrong sprite Bella, who is thirteen. The girls, overseen by their fond but barely coping Mama, are forced to make their living as a singing act after the untimely death of their father. They begin with little besides youth and hope, but Marina Endicott’s genius is to show how the three girls slowly and steadily evolve into true artists even as they navigate their way to adulthood among a cast of extraordinary characters – some of them charming charlatans, some of them unpredictable eccentrics, and some of them just ordinary-seeming humans with magical gifts.
Using her gorgeous prose and extraordinary insight, Endicott lures us onto the brightly lit stage and then into the little shadows that lurk behind the curtain, and reveals how the art of vaudeville – in all its variety, madness, melodrama, hilarity and sorrow – echoes the art of life itself.)
7. What do you hope people take away with them after reading your work?
A glimpse of vaudeville, and true love for those vaudeville girls.
8. Whom do you most admire in the realm of writing and why?
More than any eminent writers whose work I love and respect, in real life I admire the women writers I know who struggle to cope with their various vocations and duties: fiction, poetry, children, paidwork, housework—who carry on producing wonderful work without the luxury of silence, solitude or sustained periods for thought. Or even a room of their own.
9. Many artists set themselves very ambitious goals. What are yours?
Well, to do better than Shakespeare and Chekhov, I guess! No—to do the best work I can, that’s all, against the impossible ambition of perfection. Fail again, fail better.
10. What advice do you give aspiring writers?
Read everything, read all the time, think hard, think again, write like a mad thing, repeat.
Posted on January 26, 2012 by John Purcell, The Booktopia Book Guru
Sweet Old World
by Deborah Robertson
‘He goes down the stairs, singing Johnny Cash. It’s a song about a man who’s fallen real low, but he’s not low, he’s forty-three years old today, there’s still time. You never know what is waiting, you just never know. This morning he can hope. And this is the thing he doesn’t ever talk about: He wants to be a father, now, not later, he doesn’t want to waste one more minute of his life.’
David Quinn’s dream of family has for years eluded him. Surely what he wants is simple? It’s only what other men have, but there’s no woman in his life, and now that he’s living on a remote island in the Atlantic, do his hopes still stand a chance?
It’s summer on the Irish island of Inishmore, and the tourists are arriving. They’re coming for the wild beauty and the five thousand years of history, the Celtic legends and the burial sites of saints. They’re coming for the drink and the sex and the craic. Seventeen-year-old Esther Bradley has come from Fremantle, on the west coast of Australia. On harsh Inishmore, where people have always struggled to survive, she is battling the landscape of her own mind. David Quinn is reluctant to catch Esther when she tumbles dangerously into his life, but happiness is about to burst upon him, and every simple thing he’s wanted will soon be close enough to touch. But is anything ever really simple any more?
Set among the ancient stories of the haunting Aran Islands, reaching to London in the 1980s and contemporary Australia, this is an unforgettable love story about life’s wounds to the spirit and flesh, and the hope we all have for healing, for one more lucky roll of the dice. Following the bestselling and acclaimed CARELESS, Sweet Old World establishes Deborah Robertson as one of our most enthralling and original storytellers, a writer whose tender, fearless vision carries her readers close to the human heart.
When Paulina dies mid-dance, leaving 12-year-old Zav and 7-year-old Sealie with Hal, their loving yet often unstable father, the family decides to plant a tree in her memory. This beautiful magnolia tree grows apace with the children, standing proud in the garden, a special place where secrets are whispered and feelings can be confessed.
As the memory tree grows, Hal, in pure grief for Paulina, feels increasingly suspicious of the world, and turns to his own brand of salvation to make sense of the voices he hears. Mrs Mac, the housekeeper and second mother since Paulina’s death, cooks, cleans, loves and worries about ‘her family’. She is even more concerned when Hal brings a stranger, Godown Moses, to the house for a beer. But Pastor Moses B. Washbourne of the Church of the Divine Conflagration, ex-sergeant of the US Army, soon becomes part of the family, with surprising and long-reaching consequences.
As the seasons pass, Sealie blossoms into a lovely young woman, the apple of Hal’s eye; Zav, having spent his childhood quietly trying to win his father’s lost attention, marries young and has a daughter, born while he is on his first tour of duty in Vietnam. And the voices continue to murmur poisonous words to Hal who knows to keep them hidden . . . until he is persuaded into the most tragic of acts.
Written with humour, compassion and poignancy, The Memory Tree is an unputdownable story of love, grief and forgiveness.
In early 1933, Rowland Sinclair and his companions are ensconced in the superlative luxury of The Hydro Majestic – Medlow Bath, where trouble seems distant indeed.
And then Harry Simpson vanishes.
Croquet and pre-dinner cocktails are abandoned for the High Country where Rowland hunts for Simpson with a determination that is as mysterious as the disappearance itself. Stockmen, gangsters and a belligerent writer all gather to the fray, as the investigation becomes embroiled with a much darker consipiracy.
Murder, Treason, Trespass, Kidnapping, Betrayal…
Again, Rowland Sinclair finds himself in the middle of it all.
Abby runs her own agency, providing beautiful girls for promotional events. She needs a new website and when she calls in the web contractors, none other than the gorgeous, sexy, young Marcus turns up.
Abby had met Marcus at a party a few weeks earlier and they had an amazing one-night stand. Abby is not unhappy to see him again. He is rather divine, after all. It’s just that she’s 33 and he’s 22, so how can she ever expect anything to come of this relationship.
But Marcus is determined and sets out to prove to Abby that he is wise beyond his years and knows what he wants. Abbie is not so sure and when she escapes to Italy and meets someone else, she must decide whether to follow her head or her heart.
The Fiancee
Belinda’s life is in free-fall after the sudden death of her fiancé Andy.
But then ghostly signs begin to appear which suggest he might not really be gone. And Belinda begins to tumble even further.
Will his final parting gift be enough to save her?
The Mother
Evelyn McGavin, Andy’s mum, is also struggling. She copes with her sorrow by shoplifting (once), hating Belinda (constantly) and jumping out of a plane.
In her skydiving instructor, Baz, she finds an unexpected friend. But why is he so agitated when he hears how Andy died?
Two women, united in their loss, separated by their grief. And yet still linked in a most unexpected way …
On a searing summer’s day paramedic Holly Garland rushes to an emergency to find a man collapsed with a bullet wound in the back of his head, CPR being performed by two bystanders, and her long-estranged brother Seth watching it all unfold.
Seth claims to be the dying man’s best friend, but Holly knows better than to believe anything he says and fears that his re-appearance will reveal the bleak secrets of her past – secrets which both her fiance Fraser and her colleagues have no idea exist, and which if exposed could cause her to lose everything.
Detective Ella Marconi suspects Seth too, but she’s also sure the dead man’s wife is lying, and the deceased’s boss seems just too helpful. But then a shocking double homicide related to the case makes Ella realise that her investigations are getting closer to the killer, but also increasing the risk of an even higher body count.
In Australia in the 1840s, the lives of two very different women intersect. Ellis MacRorie is shipped to Victoria from her Scottish homeland by her bankrupt father; Leerpeen Weelan, her Aboriginal servant known as Louisa, has lost her tribe in a bloody act of violence.
Forced to marry a man she does not love, and isolated from all society, Ellis is resigned to a solitary life on the remote Western District homestead of Strathcarron. After the tragic death of two babies, she is ready is give up altogether. Although Louisa has endured dispossession and the loss of her own family, she becomes a steadfast source of guidance, friendship and strength for Ellis. When the American Romantic landscape painter, sketcher and collector Sanford P. Hart comes to stay at Strathcarron, the two women are transformed forever – in both enriching and devastating measures.
One hundred and fifty years later, ambitious assistant curator Cornelia, researching an exhibition on S. P. Hart for the National Gallery of Victoria, makes a remarkable discovery that has the potential to rewrite history. However, it is not Hart’s paintings that offer a glimpse into the untold events of nineteenth-century rural Australia, but rather something very rare . . .
The Longing is a novel about loss, finding home and the significance of history – what is recorded and what is left unknown.
An intoxicating outback romance – set in Victoria and Queensland – that is bursting with love for life on the land.
Bella threw her hat into the air. ‘We’ve lived one of our dreams, Patty. Our outback road trip is done. Now we’re free and ready for our next adventure. God, I love life!’ Bella Vermaelon and her best friend Patty are two fun-loving country girls bonded in a sisterhood no blood tie could ever beat. Now they are coming to the end of a road trip which has taken them from their family farms in the rugged Victorian high country to the red dust of the Queensland outback. For almost a year they have mustered on cattle stations, cooked for weary stockmen, played hard at rodeos and outback parties, and danced through life like a pair of wild tumbleweeds.
And with the arrival of Patty’s brother Will and Bella’s cousin Macca, it seems love is on the horizon too …
Then a devastating tragedy strikes, and Bella’s world is changed for ever.
So she runs – from the only life she has ever known. But can she really turn her back on the man she loves? Or on the land that runs deep in her blood?
An exciting new novel full of romance and mystery from the author of the bestselling Red Dust and Blue Skies.
When Anna and Matt finally buy their dream farm, their struggles aren’t quite over. First it’s patchy rain and poor crops, then Matt has an accident … and even when the heavens finally open all might yet be lost.
Anna and Matt Butler were childhood sweethearts with a dream of owning their own land, a dream they achieved through hard work and determination.
But as the seasons conspire against them and Matt is involved in a terrible accident, the couple face financial ruin and the loss of their farm.
As they fight for everything they hold dear, they suddenly find themselves caught up in events much bigger and more dangerous than they could ever have imagined.
Purple Roads is a story about maintaining faith in yourself, staying true to your ideals and, most of all, the belief that some things are worth fighting for.
1. To begin with why don’t you tell us a little bit about yourself – where were you born? Raised? Schooled?
I was born in the north of England, in a place called Hexham, which I’ve never been to, apart from being born there, so I can’t tell you anything about it. Then I was raised, and schooled, in Luxembourg, where my father worked for the European Parliament. So I was a euro-brat. This means that, while I’m English, I arrived at University in England without having lived there, and knowing nothing about British cartoons or children’s television in general. This is a disadvantage in drinking games, as it turns out.
2. What did you want to be when you were twelve, eighteen and thirty? And why?
When I was twelve, I don’t know that I wanted to be anything in particular, other than irresistibly attractive to girls. I probably dreamed of being an assassin or a spy or something stupid (awesome) like that. When I was eighteen, though, I was already fixated on the idea of being a writer. I grew up in a house full to the rafters with books, my mother encouraged reading from an early age, and I had a couple of really inspirational English teachers at high school, so it was something of an inevitability. When I was thirty, my wife was pregnant, and so I suppose my overriding wish was to be a good father. And a lottery winner, so that I could surround my unborn child with the kind of security defences usually seen in a nation state.
3. What strongly held belief did you have at eighteen that you do not have now?
When I was eighteen it seemed obvious to me that God did not exist. And I still don’t believe in a sentient, interventionist God. But since the birth of the aforementioned child, my position has reversed. It now seems to me a self-evidence that the universe, and life, are holy.
4. What were three works of art – book or painting or piece of music, etc – you can now say, had a great effect on you and influenced your own development as a writer?
I think I have to choose Coraline, by Neil Gaiman, as the first one, because it arrived in my life just when I was about to go into publishing (I’m an editor as well as a writer), and it completely opened my eyes to what it was possible to achieve in a book for younger readers. I think it’s a masterpiece, one of the few utterly perfect books I have ever read. Without it, I probably wouldn’t have become a children’s book editor, and in turn I probably wouldn’t have written for children.
It’s not something I’d admit to when talking to any member of the literati (just on an online questionnaire that anyone can read), but an absolutely formative influence was the film True Romance. I was a teenager at a time when several people – particularly Quentin Tarantino, who wrote that film – were making films that placed a real emphasis on writing. By which I mean the kind of novelistic structures that Tarantino uses, but also the importance he places on the rhythms and poetry of speech. At the same time, he and his coterie were bringing demotic, genre influences into arthouse cinema, combining grand ambitions with the violence and cool music of the drive-in. I don’t know if books like In Darkness – which as much as it’s a novel about slavery and the brutalizing effect of poverty, is also essentially a gangster story – would exist without Tarantino. (I’d also trace the current mingling of literary and genre fiction, not to Kavalier and Clay as some have claimed, much as I love that book, but to Tarantino.) And True Romance, for me, while it has its flaws, is the purest expression of that era and that ambition. It’s stylish but it also has substance; it’s a genuinely moving love story but it’s also a violent B-movie fantasy. I love everything about it. In fact one of my first dates with my now-wife was to make her watch it on DVD. She loved it so much we had the theme music at our wedding.
Finally, and more inexplicably, I happened to see a sculpture at an exhibition just as I was writing In Darkness, and it had a really profound, visceral effect on me. It’s by Rachel Schwalm and it’s called ‘Body Incarnate’. Schwalm works with huge slabs of marble, into which she cuts rectilinear holes. And then inside the hole, she uses pigments and rust and who knows what else to create these splashes of colour. ‘Body Incarnate’ is a frame of white marble, and then inside, ochres and reds, kind of glowing. I don’t know what it means, but to me, it conjures associations of the heart within the body, the baby within the womb, Jesus within the tomb. It seems to say something about deserts, and life itself, and religion. I would go so far as to say that it’s the most beautiful object I have ever seen – and I have thought about it almost constantly since. It induces mad thoughts in me, along the lines of, ‘I just need to win the lottery so that I can get a bigger house and then I can buy the sculpture (as well as aforementioned army)’. Since In Darkness is about a boy, a little point of human light, trapped in the darkness of fallen rubble, I think the influence is probably obvious.
5. Considering the innumerable artistic avenues open to you, why did you choose to write a novel?
I don’t believe there were any other artistic avenues available to me – I can’t draw, and I’m appallingly lacking in musical ability. Writing is the only artistic thing I can do. Having said that, I do think it’s a uniquely fascinating art form: what it does is to create – not even on the page but in the mind of the reader – a four-dimensional picture, a kind of time-sculpture, made up of the story stretching from beginning to end. And it’s not just visual – it incorporates smell and taste, all sensations. Reading a book is the closest thing possible to possession, to being another person, and you can carry it around in your pocket. It’s astonishing.
6. Please tell us about your latest novel In Darkness…
In Darkness is about Shorty, a teenage gangster from the slums of Haiti, who finds himself trapped under a fallen hospital, after the earthquake of January 2010. There, in the darkness, thirsty, desperate and alone, he looks back on his life as a gangster, on his long search for his sister, who was kidnapped by a rival gang, and on the terrible things he has done to try to get her back. There’s a certain aspect of mystery, too, since Shorty has been shot in the arm, hence being in hospital, but we don’t know why. And of course there’s the greater mystery of whether or not he will be dug out, whether he will be saved.
At the same time, as the days of isolation and thirst stretch out, Shorty starts to dream, or to hallucinate, the story of Toussaint l’Ouverture, the Haitian slave leader of the late 18th century, who managed the extraordinary military achievement of defeating the French army, as well as forces from Spain and Britain, to free his people.
As the lives of these two characters merge, and we learn more and more about the dark history that has brought Shorty to hospital with a bullet wound, and the terrible things he did to try to find his lost sister, the line between reality and fiction, between past and present gets increasingly blurred, and a kind of possession occurs, of the present day boy by the 18th century hero.
7. What do you hope people take away with them after reading your work?
I think the overarching theme of the book is hope, and the existence of hope. Really awful things happen to Shorty in the course of the story, and to the slaves of the eighteenth century. And Shorty does awful things too. But in the end, all hope is not lost, and I feel that’s an essential truth about life in general.
8. Whom do you most admire in the realm of writing and why?
This really is a terrifying question, because admiration is very different to liking. There are plenty of authors whose books I love, but do I admire them… I don’t know. Admiration implies a moral dimension, doesn’t it?
There is a writer I love and admire, though, and that’s Marilynne Robinson, the author of Gilead and Home. Until I read Home, I thought Middlemarchwas the best novel I had ever read, but I think Home might just edge it out. Robinson’s prose is a thing of miracle – honed, poised, often turning on the ineffably perfect placement of a semi-colon. No word is wasted. And, at the same time, Home is the most extraordinarily good book in the moral sense. On the surface it’s a family drama, rather quiet, without any startling events. But as the book goes on, it reveals itself to be about, among other things, segregation in America in the mid-twentieth century, and the failure of Christianity to face up to what was, essentially, an egregious offence to the very principles on which Christianity was founded. It also reminds you, powerfully, of just how recently the civil rights movement occurred – by giving you this very small human window into what it must have been like to be condemned to the life of a second-class citizen because of the colour of your skin.
It’s quite an angry book, in a very restrained and quiet way. It’s also overwhelmingly sad. But I would urge every person in the world to read it.
9. Many artists set themselves very ambitious goals. What are yours?
I don’t know that I have goals, in particular. To write good books, I guess. And maybe to move people, and, if at all possible, to get them to think about and empathise with people in very different situations. To reveal the common humanity, the common story. I hope it doesn’t sound too naïve or evangelical to say that we still live in a world in which half the population live in conditions of horrific deprivation and violence, and that seems unacceptable. In that context I can’t see the point of writing about a love triangle in London. (I apologise for this excess of sincerity.)
10. What advice do you give aspiring writers?
My advice to aspiring writers is to ignore all advice to aspiring writers, including my reply to this question. I would also like to preface this reply with the caveat that, by answering, I’m not suggesting that I know what writers should do. I don’t. I’m answering this more as a reader and editor than a writer, because to answer as a writer would suggest that I think I’ve reached a point where I’m pleased with my writing. And I’m not – I think I still have a long way to go.
But anyway… what aspiring writers should especially ignore is any kind of injunction to write what they know. You don’t have to write what you know – that is, you don’t have to write about your place and time. What you do have to do is to put some of your own emotion into what you write. I think a book is like a Frankenstein’s monster – you build it out of fragments of inspiration and ideas. But then you animate it with your own feelings. You can write about a place you’ve never been to, as long as you put some of your own, real, human emotion into the story. That’s what makes the story feel real.
Young Adult Edition
Personally, I’ve also found that the advice to write every day, or its subtle variant, to have a notebook at hand at all times, is nonsense. I tried this, and what I ended up doing was working hard to incorporate the clever lines I had jotted down in my notebook, which ends up feeling like rather an artificial exercise; better, I think, to remain in the flow of the story as you’re writing. If you happen to come up with clever lines as you go, then all the better, but if you’re shoehorning them in from a notebook, then you’re interrupting the movement, I think.
I also don’t believe this notion that you have to write a thousand words a day, or what have you. There are plenty of very good writers (like Marilynne Robinson) who have barely written at all (three books in 20 years), and, vice versa, there are plenty of very prolific, very bad writers. To go back to that Frankenstein analogy, I subscribe to the Pixar view of stories, as articulated by John Lasseter: If the story doesn’t have a heart, it doesn’t work. That’s the all-important thing. You can write a thousand words a day if you want, but as far as I’m concerned you’d be better off thinking about the story, and how it’s going to operate on an emotional level. It has to make the reader feel something.
Oh, and some advice from my side-career as an editor: spend a lot of time on your title – maybe just as much time as you spend writing the book. Titles are very, very important. And then the usual Hemingway stuff: Don’t use adverbs. Don’t use any other replacement for the word ‘said’ (‘replied’ and ‘shouted’ are allowed, at a pinch.) The point of the word ‘said’ is that the reader doesn’t see it. Don’t use the word ‘suddenly’. Never, ever write a dream scene – they distract from the story, and are usually a cheat for giving the reader information they haven’t earned.
But, as I said, this advice is probably wrong for you anyway – it’s just the advice I wish someone had given me, instead of all that stuff about writing in notebooks. Please, therefore, ignore everything I have just said. (Apart from the dream scene thing.)
Posted on January 25, 2012 by John Purcell, The Booktopia Book Guru
Vivid tale of life in pre-revolutionary Paris beats Matthew Hollis’s biography of Edward Thomas to £30,000 prize cheque writes Mark Brown in The Guardian
A vividly told story of life in pre-revolutionary Paris on Tuesday won the 2011 Costa book award in what turned out to be a bitterly fought two-way tussle between fact and fiction.
Andrew Miller was given one of the UK’s most prestigious literary prizes – and a £30,000 cheque – at a ceremony in London for his sixth novel, Pure.
The chairman of the judges, Geordie Greig, said “there really was a fierce debate” during the 90-minute judging discussion. “There was quite bitter dissent and argument to find the winner. The debate was prolonged with passionate views over two books.” The books were Pureand Now All Roads Lead to France, Matthew Hollis’s gripping and moving biography of the war poet Edward Thomas.
Greig, editor of the London Evening Standard, said the prize, which chooses the best overall book from five categories – novel, biography, poetry, children’s novel and first novel – was one which came “with a sense of impossibility about it. You’re not just comparing apples and oranges, it feels like you’re comparing bananas and chicken curry. It makes the task difficult and interesting.” He said Pure emerged as the majority winner after 45 minutes of quite bitter “toing and froing, dinging and donging” – not unpleasant, he said, but “forthright”. Read full article…
Costa book of the year winner Andrew Miller. Photograph: Abbie Trayler-Smith
PURE
The author of the prize-winning, hugely acclaimed INGENIOUS PAIN returns to the 18th century with an enthralling tale set in pre-revolutionary Paris.
A year of bones, of grave-dirt, relentless work. Of mummified corpses and chanting priests.
A year of rape, suicide, sudden death. Of friendship too. Of desire. Of love…
A year unlike any other he has lived.
Deep in the heart of Paris, its oldest cemetery is, by 1785, overflowing, tainting the very breath of those who live nearby. Into their midst comes Jean-Baptiste Baratte, a young, provincial engineer charged by the king with demolishing it.
At first Baratte sees this as a chance to clear the burden of history, a fitting task for a modern man of reason. But before long, he begins to suspect that the destruction of the cemetery might be a prelude to his own.
About the Author : Andrew Miller was born in Bristol in 1960. He has lived in Spain, Japan, Ireland and France, and currently lives in Somerset. His first novel, INGENIOUS PAIN, was published by Sceptre in 1997 and won the James Tait Black Memorial Prize for Fiction, the International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award and the Grinzane Cavour prize in Italy. He has since written four novels: CASANOVA, OXYGEN, which was shortlisted for the Whitbread Novel Award and the Booker Prize in 2001, THE OPTIMISTS, and ONE MORNING LIKE A BIRD.
Now All Roads Lead to France : The Last Years of Edward Thomas by Matthew Hollis
A fascinating exploration of one of Britain’s most influential First World War poets.
Edward Thomas was perhaps the most beguiling and influential of First World War poets. Now All Roads Lead to France is an account of his final five years, centred on his extraordinary friendship with Robert Frost and Thomas’s fatal decision to fight in the war. The book also evokes an astonishingly creative moment in English literature, when London was a battleground for new, ambitious kinds of writing. A generation that included W. B. Yeats, Ezra Pound, Robert Frost and Rupert Brooke were ‘making it new’ – vehemently and pugnaciously.
These larger-than-life characters surround a central figure, tormented by his work and his marriage. But as his friendship with Frost blossomed, Thomas wrote poem after poem, and his emotional affliction began to lift. In 1914 the two friends formed the ideas that would produce some of the most remarkable verse of the twentieth century. But the War put an ocean between them: Frost returned to the safety of New England while Thomas stayed to fight for the Old.
It is these roads taken – and those not taken – that are at the heart of this remarkable book, which culminates in Thomas’s tragic death on Easter Monday 1917.
Matthew Hollis is the author of Ground Water, short listed for the Whitbread Prize for Poetry, the Guardian First Book Award and the Forward Prize for Best First Collection. Now All Roads Lead to France is his first prose book.
Learn to bake with Britain’s favourite women’s fiction author, Marian Keyes…
Saved by Cake gives an extremely honest account of Marian Keyes’ recent battle with depression, and how baking has helped her.
A complete novice in the kitchen, Marian decided to bake a cake for a friend and that was it – she realized that baking was what she needed to do in order to get her through each day. And so she baked, and she wrote her recipes down, and little by little the depression has started to lift, along with her sponges . . .
With chapters on cupcakes, cheesecakes, meringues and macaroons, chocolate cakes, fruit cakes and favourite classics, Marian’s recipes are aimed firmly at beginner bakers, offering hints and tips to help along the way. Never patronizing, always honest and witty, accessible and full of fun, the bakes and cakes that Marian serves up in this cookbook will put a smile on your face and make you happy.
From her Consistently Reliable Cupcakes and Very Chocolately Macaroons, to the ease of her Fridge-set Honeycomb Cheesecake, you will want to have a go at making all of Marian’s recipes. The shoe and handbag biscuits particularly. Very covetable. Very Marian.
Posted on January 24, 2012 by John Purcell, The Booktopia Book Guru
The battle being fought between atheists and believers has raged for centuries. In one camp stand those quoting holy writ and in the other stand those quoting Richard Dawkins.
With his new book, Religion for Atheists, Alain de Botton steps into the firing line, deciding bravely to walk a path up through the middle of ‘no man’s land’.
This is a book which will certainly get people talking. And arguing. And I am sure the warring parties will leave off shooting at each other for a time to take aim at the lonely figure standing between them. But I do not fear for Alain de Botton. He is a very clear thinker. Easily a match for most hotheads.
Here’s a little bit about it and a short extract…
Religion for Atheists: A non-believer’s guide to the uses of religion
What if religions are neither all true nor all nonsense?
The boring debate between fundamentalist believers and non-believers is finally moved on by Alain de Botton’s inspiring new book, which boldly argues that the supernatural claims of religion are of course entirely false – and yet that religions still have some very important things to teach the secular world.
Religion for Atheists suggests that rather than mocking religions, agnostics and atheists should instead steal from them – because they’re packed with good ideas on how we might live and arrange our societies. Blending deep respect with total impiety, de Botton (a non-believer himself) proposes that we should look to religions for insights into, among other concerns, how to:
build a sense of community
make our relationships last
overcome feelings of envy and inadequacy
escape the twenty-four hour media
go travelling
get more out of art, architecture and music
and create new businesses designed to address our emotional needs.
For too long non-believers have faced a stark choice between either swallowing lots of peculiar doctrines or doing away with a range of consoling and beautiful rituals and ideas.
The most boring and unproductive question one can ask of any religion is whether or not it is true, – in terms of being handed down from heaven to the sound of trumpets and supernaturally governed by prophets and celestial beings.
To save time, and at the risk of losing readers painfully early on in this project, let us bluntly state that of course no religions are true in any god-given sense. This is a book for people who are unable to believe in miracles, spirits or tales of burning shrubbery, nor have any deep interest in the exploits of unusual men and women like the thirteenth-century saint Agnes of Montepulciano, who was said to be able to levitate two feet off the ground while praying and to bring children back from the dead – and who, at the end of her life (supposedly) ascended to heaven from southern Tuscany on the back of an angel.Click here to read more…
Tiffany sets her novel in the sexually repressed 1950s of Victoria but her story has a universality about it that transcends time and place. It is a story about love, lust, loneliness, family, animals and the rhythms of nature. She writes with lucid clarity, bringing as much beauty to descriptions of the daily ministrations to lactating cows, to those of Harry’s observations of the viciousness of the birds that patrol the boundaries of his paddock, to the surprising and unexpected yearnings of the human heart. And let’s not forget that despite the strictures of society at the time, growing up in the country meant be surrounded by fecundity and a lot of rutting – the cycle of sex, birth, decay, death is simply an observable fact.
