Andrew Cattanach
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Haylee Nash
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Toni Whitmont
Kylie Ladd
author of Last Summer
and After the Fall
reveals…
The 5 best novels I read this year are…
Caribou Island
by David Vann
An Alaskan Revolutionary Road, Caribou Island from David Vann, bestselling and critically acclaimed author of Legend of a Suicide, is a devastating novel about a marriage, a couple blighted by past shadows and the weight of expectation, of themselves and of each other.
On a small island in a glacier-fed lake on Alaska’s Kenai Peninsula, a marriage is unravelling.
Gary, driven by thirty years of diverted plans, and Irene, haunted by a tragedy in her past, are trying to rebuild their life together. Following the outline of Gary’s old dream, they’re hauling logs out to Caribou Island in good weather and in terrible storms, in sickness and in health, to patch together the kind of cabin that drew them to Alaska in the first place.
Across the water on the mainland, Irene and Gary’s grown daughter, Rhoda is starting her own life. She fantasizes about the perfect wedding day, whilst her betrothed, Jim the dentist, wonders about the possibility of an altogether different future.
Brilliantly drawn and fiercely honest in its depiction of love and disappointment, David Vann’s first novel confirms him as one of America’s most dazzling writers of fiction.
The Life
by Malcolm Knox
Daring, dazzling, funny and heartbreaking, this is a story about fame and ambition, surfing and pine-lime Splices … a superbly written and ambitious novel by one of Australia’s rising stars. The Life will simply blow you away.
He looked into the Pacific and the Pacific looked back into him.
The Life tells the story of former-world-champion Australian surfer, Dennis Keith, from inside the very heart of the fame and madness that is ‘The Life’.
Now bloated and paranoid, former Australian surfing legend Dennis Keith is holed up in his mother’s retirement village, shuffling to the shop for a Pine-Lime Splice every day, barely existing behind his aviator sunnies and crazy OCD rules, and trying not to think about the waves he’d made his own and the breaks he once ruled like a god. Years before he’d been robbed of the world title that had his name on it – and then drugs, his brother, and the disappearance and murder of his girlfriend and had done the rest. Out of the blue, a young would-be biographer comes knocking and stirs up memories Dennis thought he’d buried. It takes Dennis a while to realise that she’s not there to write his story at all.
Daring, ambitious, dazzling, The Life is also as real as it gets – a searing, beautiful novel about fame and ambition and the price that must sometimes be paid for reaching too high.
Dog Boy
by Eva Hornung
Abandoned in a big city at the onset of winter, a hungry four-year-old boy follows a stray dog to her lair. There in the rich smelly darkness, in the rub of hair, claws and teeth, he joins four puppies suckling at their mother’s teats. And so begins Romochka’s life as a dog.
Weak and hairless, with his useless nose and blunt little teeth, Romochka is ashamed of what a poor dog he makes. But learning how to be something else…that’s a skill a human can master. Fortunately–because one day Romochka will have to learn how to be a boy.
The story of the child raised by beasts is timeless. But in Dog Boy Eva Hornung has created such a vivid and original telling, so viscerally convincing, that it becomes not just new but definitive:
Yes, this is how it would be.
Animal People
by Charlotte Wood
A sharply observed, 24-hour urban love story that follows Stephen Connolly – a character from the bestselling novel The Children – through one of the worst days of his life. The day he has decided to dump his girlfriend.
On a stiflingly hot December day, Stephen has decided it’s time to break up with his girlfriend Fiona. He’s 39, aimless and unfulfilled, he’s without a clue working out how to make his life better. All he has are his instincts – and unfortunately they might just be his downfall . . .
As he makes his way through the pitiless city and the hours of a single day, Stephen must fend off his demanding family, endure another shift of his dead-end job at the zoo (including an excruciating teambuilding event), face up to Fiona’s aggressive ex-husband and the hysteria of a children’s birthday party that goes terribly wrong. As an ordinary day develops into an existential crisis, Stephen begins to understand – perhaps too late – that love is not a trap, and only he can free himself.
Hilarious, tender and heartbreaking, Animal People is a portrait of urban life, a meditation on the conflicted nature of human-animal relationships, and a masterpiece of storytelling.
Animal People invites readers to question the way we think about animals – what makes an ‘animal person’? What value do we, as a society, place on the lives of creatures? Do we brutalise our pets even as we love them? What’s wrong with anthropomorphism anyway? Filled with challenging ideas and shocks of recognition and revelation, Animal People shows a writer of great depth and compassion at work.
Daughters In Law
by Joanna Trollope
Rachel has always loved being at the centre of her large family. She has fiercely devoted herself to her three sons all their lives,and continues to do so even now they are all grown up. They are, of course, devoted to her – she and Anthony, their father, hold the family together at their big, beautiful, ramshackle house near the wide, bird-haunted coast of Suffolk.
But when Luke, her youngest, gets married, Rachel finds that control is slipping away. Other people seem to be becoming more important to her children than she is, and she can no longer rely on her role as undisputed matriarch. A power struggle develops which can only end in unhappiness; her three daughters-in-law want to do things their own way, and so, to her grief, do her sons…
Earlier in the year I read and reviewed Kylie’s latest novel, Last Summer – here is a taste of that review…
By the simple act of telling a story a good book can carry a light into the dark and unexamined corners of a reader’s life. The darkest of these unexamined corners is occupied by the single irrefutable truth of our existence, death. Left in the shadows this stark fact can take on all of the attributes of a nightmarish spectre. Left unexamined we may be left entirely unprepared when death intrudes upon our own lives. Something it will do, eventually.
Last Summer by Kylie Ladd, begins with the sudden death of Rory Buchanan, captain of the local cricket team, a man in the prime of his life. We immediately enter the lives of those Rory left behind – his wife, Colleen, his sister, Kelly, her husband, Joe, and Rory’s friends and team-mates, Nick, James and Pete, and their wives, Laine, Anita and Trinity as they, in their various ways, cope with Rory’s death and face up to the fact that life does, and will, go on without him.
Last Summer is told from the points of view of these nine characters with full chapters from one point of view only. This method of storytelling requires strong characterisation so that each individual point of view provides a unique perspective on the events. By choosing suburban Melbourne as her setting, and the cricket club as her focal point, Ladd has made things difficult for herself. There is much that is necessarily shared by all of these nine characters. They are all white, they are all moderately well off, they are all around the same age and they all have some connection to the game of cricket. This seeming difficulty turns out to be one of the novel’s strengths. Click here to read more…
Filed under: Australian Author | Tagged: After the Fall, Five Fiction Favourites for 2011, Kylie Ladd, Last Summer | 1 Comment »
Lionel Shriver has long been a favourite author of mine, and thus I have to confess that I didn’t come to her latest novel, 
Guest Reviewer Kylie Ladd on When My Husband Does the Dishes… by Kerri Sackville
“When my husband does the dishes… what?” asked my eleven year old son when he first saw (or rather heard) me reading it. Knowing full well that the original title had actually been When My Husband Does The Dishes He Wants Sex I quickly and seamlessly steered the discussion in a different direction.
“Uh, um, nothing!” I stuttered. “It’s just ‘When my husband does the dishes’. Full stop! End of story!”
“No it’s not,” said my daughter, eight, who is quite frankly sometimes a bit too smart to be all that likeable. “Those dots are an ellipsis. It means there is another thought coming.” She turned to her brother. “You should have listened more in grade three.” I tried to sneak away, the book tucked under my arm, but she stood in the doorway, blocking my exit. “So mum”, she demanded, “what’s in it?”
I couldn’t tell her. Not because Kerri Sackville’s brilliant first book is filthy and depraved (though it does have some bits in it about wet patches), but because I couldn’t do it to the sisterhood. To the wifehood. To the motherhood. Couldn’t give away our secrets; couldn’t let the opposition (also known as our husbands and children) in on any knowledge that they might use against us.
Couldn’t admit to my spouse, for example, that like Kerri I have fed the kids noodles and tomato sauce for dinner three nights running when he was away on business and told them to tell him it was spaghetti ; couldn’t confess to my progeny, that actually, the back of the sock drawer isn’t mummy’s special place, it’s just where she puts your homemade Mother’s Day gifts so she doesn’t have to look at them.
Kerri Sackville knows it all. She’s been in the frontlines of motherhood for more years now than she’d thank me for telling you. She has three kids, an, um, ‘back massager’ in her bedside drawer and her own painstakingly perfected delousing technique. She is also extremely bloody funny and made me laugh so loudly and frequently while reading this book that in the end my husband threw me out of bed and suggested that the title should really be “When my husband does the dishes it’s to get away from his unhinged wife”.
Those of you who follow Kerri’s blog, her tweets or her regular columns for the Mama Mia website will know what a gifted and hilarious writer she is, but also how very frequently she is bang on the money with her shrewd observations and razor-sharp wit. When My Husband Does the Dishes . . . certainly made me laugh, but it also made me go “Shit, yeah” under my breath so often that I had to keep glancing around to check that the kids hadn’t heard. If you know how to flirt without flashing your maternity bra, if you’ve ever kept a child home from school with a rash that later washed off, or if you sometimes dream of raspberry fondant instead of chocolate swirl (and I’m not talking ice cream here), this book is for you.
But it’s not for my children. “I know, mum!” my son declared a few days after I’d started reading Kerri’s book. “The whole title should be ‘When my husband does the dishes his hands get wet’.” Yes, I told him. Yes, you’re right! That shut him up, anyway, but I’m still keeping it away from the eight year old.
Available 2nd May 2011. Order your copy of When My Husband Does the Dishes … – CLICK HERE
—————————–
Thanks to Guest Reviewer – Kylie Ladd
Kylie Ladd is the author of After the Fall
, and was the first author to answer the Booktopia Book Guru’s Ten Terrifying Questions – read Kylie’s answers here…
When Kylie is not busy scribbling, she is also a delightful distraction on Twitter – follow her here…
Kylie’s Website: here…
About After the Fall:
The story of a friendship between two couples – and an affair that blows their worlds apart.
Two married couples: Kate and Cary, Cressida and Luke. Four people who meet, click, and become firm friends. But then Kate and Luke discover a growing attraction, which becomes an obsession. They fall in love, then fall into an affair. It blows their worlds apart. After the fall, nothing will ever be the same again.
Rory Buchanan has it all: looks, talent, charisma – an all around good-guy, he’s the centre of every party and a loving father and husband. Then one summer’s afternoon tragedy strikes … and those who are closest to him struggle to come to terms with their loss. Friendships are strained, marriages falter and loyalties are tested in a gripping and brilliantly crafted novel of loss, grief and desire.
Told from the points of view of the nine people who are mourning Rory, this riveting novel presents a vivid snapshot of contemporary suburban Australia and how we live now.
Marriage, friendship, family – all are dissected with great psychological insight as they start to unravel under the pressure of grief. The characters live on the page, their lives are unfolded and their dilemmas are as real as our own.
Last Summer is a novel about loss – the terrible pain of losing a husband, brother or friend, but also all those smaller losses that everyone must face: the loss of youth, the shattering of dreams, the fading of convictions and the change in our notions of who we thought we were. It is also about what comes after the loss: how we pick up the pieces and the way we remake our lives.
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Filed under: Australian Author, Author Interview, Biography/Memoir, Cutural Studies, Feminism, Food and drink, Health and Well-Being, Humour, Non Fiction, Parenting, Philosophy, Social Commentary, True Crime | Tagged: After the Fall, Kerri Sackville, Kylie Ladd, When My Husband Does the Dishes... | 9 Comments »