Some books we have enjoyed recently...
The Simple Act of Reading
Debra Adelaide (ed)
June 2015 | Vintage | $29.99pb
Debra Adelaide has edited a charming collection of writers’ memories of their childhood reading. David Malouf, Carrie Tiffany, Joan London, Gabrielle Carey, Andy Griffiths and others wander down their own individual memory lanes, sharing their love of reading and its influence on their own writing. Books of this kind are fun as they remind us of our own past reading and help to unearth much that we had forgotten.
June 2015 | Vintage | $29.99pb
Debra Adelaide has edited a charming collection of writers’ memories of their childhood reading. David Malouf, Carrie Tiffany, Joan London, Gabrielle Carey, Andy Griffiths and others wander down their own individual memory lanes, sharing their love of reading and its influence on their own writing. Books of this kind are fun as they remind us of our own past reading and help to unearth much that we had forgotten.
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| BiP guest review by Brendan Strauch |
Australian Confederates: How 42 Australians joined the rebel cause and fired the last shot in the American Civil War
Terry Smyth
Aug 2015 | Ebury | $34.99pb
A young lad is rescued from a rushing creek in Northern Victoria. His rescuer is feted and goes on to write his own history in colonial Australia. Did a famous Victorian parliamentarian not attend the Melbourne Club dinner for visiting rebel officers, and if so, why not? Where does the last stitch go in the burial shroud of a sailor?
These anecdotes form a small but fascinating part of this eminently readable insight into the political machinations, social history and the international diplomatic storm surrounding the visit to Melbourne of the Confederate raider CSS Shenandoah in the summer of 1865. How did forty-two Australians sail off into history to participate in one of the defining moments in the history of the United States? Victoria was a British colonial outpost and was subject to the laws of the mother country, but in the state of the Eureka rebellion the confederate cause found sympathy, not necessarily on the question of slavery but rather in a desire for sovereignty and independence. Australian Confederates is an intriguing tale of how, in a world devoid of convenient communication, the Civil War continued for the captain and crew of the CSS Shenandoah long past the surrender of the southern rebel states and how, in the year of its 150th anniversary, there exists this little-known link between the United States and Australia.
A Little Life
Hanya YanagiharaMay 2015 | Picador | $32.99pb
Long-listed for the 2015 Man Booker Prize, A Little Life is a work of extraordinary intelligence and heart, a masterful depiction of heartbreak, and a dark and haunting examination of the tyranny of experience and memory.
Brace yourself for the most astonishing, challenging, upsetting and profoundly moving book in many a season. Hanya Yanagihara’s novel is an epic about love and friendship in the twenty-first century that goes into some of the darkest places fiction has ever travelled and yet somehow improbably breaks through into the light. When four graduates from a small Massachusetts college move to New York to make their way, they are broke, adrift, and buoyed only by their friendship and ambition. There is kind, handsome Willem, an aspiring actor; JB, a quick-witted, sometimes cruel Brooklyn-born painter seeking entry to the art world; Malcolm, a frustrated architect at a prominent firm; and withdrawn, brilliant, enigmatic Jude, who serves as their centre of gravity. Over the decades, their relationships deepen and darken, tinged by addiction, success, and pride. Yet their greatest challenge, each comes to realize, is Jude himself, by midlife a terrifyingly talented litigator yet an increasingly broken man, his mind and body scarred by an unspeakable childhood, and haunted by what he fears is a degree of trauma that he will not only be unable to overcome, but that will define his life forever. This book has become a staff favourite.
The Blue Guitar
John Banville
August 2015 | Vintage | $32.99pb
Oliver Orme used to be a painter, well-known and well-rewarded, but the muse has deserted him. He is also, as he confesses, a thief; he does not steal for gain, but for the thrill of possession, the need to capture and fix the world around him. His worst theft is Polly, the wife of his friend Marcus, with whom he has had an affair. When the affair is discovered, Oliver hides himself away in his childhood home and from here he tells the story of a year, from one autumn to the next.
In his delineation of Oliver, John Banville has created one of the most memorable characters in recent fiction: compelling yet weak, desperate for love and yet inclined towards acts of terrible mischief. Set in a reimagined Ireland that is both familiar and deeply unsettling, The Blue Guitar reveals a life haunted by the desire to possess and always aware of the frailty of the human heart.
A Guide to Berlin
Gail Jones
Aug 2015 | Vintage | $32.99pb **BiP price $27.99
A Guide to Berlin' is the name of a short story written by Vladimir Nabokov in 1925, when he was a young man of 26, living in Berlin.
A group of six international travellers, two Italians, two Japanese, an American and an Australian, meet in empty apartments in Berlin to share stories and memories. Each is enthralled in some way to the work of Vladimir Nabokov, and each is finding their way in deep winter in a haunted city. A moment of devastating violence shatters the group, and changes the direction of everyone's story. Brave and brilliant, A Guide to Berlin traces the strength and fragility of our connections through biographies and secrets.
