Tag: Australian authors

Book Review: The Wakes by Dianne Yarwood – a thoughtful, contemporary read about life, death and catering

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So we’re back in ‘feel-good fiction’ territory with a novel mostly about Clare, whose husband has had a kind of conniption and decided to leave their marriage. She becomes unhinged by this and takes some long service leave, and this coincides with her meeting a new neighbour, Louisa, who has plans for a catering business centred on funerals. Clare is persuaded to help out – she’s always been a dab hand in the kitchen and her chicken sandwiches are to die for – ha, ha!

Louisa is a larger-than-life character – tall and funny as well as kind. She’s soon in and out of Clare’s kitchen when Clare needs a friend. An accident that has left her face bruised and her front teeth chipped has confined Clare to her home. We find out that Louisa’s bouncy, chatty manner hides a secret heartache.

The story flips to Chris and his own marriage break-up – a relationship that has turned sour when he and his wife found they were unable to conceive. He thinks back to his relationship with Beth when he was in London – was she his one great love? He determines to find out if she is still in Australia – he has a box of her things he’d like to return. Chris is also no stranger to death, being an ER doctor, and it is this that brings about his first meeting with Clare at the caterers’ very first wake.

Clare worked at a very fast pace. It wasn’t until people began streaming through the doors that Louisa admitted how uncomfortable she felt around crowds. Somehow, stupidly, she’d thought mourners would be different. Quieter, less of a strain on her sensibilities. But not so. The opposite, really – all those families. She disappeared into the kitchen as the room filled up. I’ll hold the fort in there, she said with a look of concern and apology. And so Clare moved around the room in something approaching a run: she hovered by groups, raced off to the kitchen, came back, checked on what people had, offered plates and darted off again.

The Wakes makes you aware of the idea that “in the midst of life we are in death” in that it is the passing of loved ones and the proximity of death that makes the characters feel aware of the wonders of life. That we only have one and we must seize the day. But there’s also a lot about the complexities of friendship. Chris’s great friend is Max, who is dying; there are other friends – particularly Paul, who was also in London during the Beth era.

Paul has his own chapters, too, and his role in the story is important as a catalyst for what happens. Paul’s a kind of counterpart for Louisa in that he’s always quick with the ready wit and can rattle off a vast selection of pop culture references at any given opportunity. But Paul’s life is an empty shell. We are not really supposed to like. him – he works in advertising – but I couldn’t help feeling sorry for him. Chris, as an ER doctor, is obviously more worthy.

Perhaps it was these moral undertones that put me off the book a little. That and the funerals. It is difficult to balance the weight of grief with that of the hopeful resolutions that we wish for the characters. Sometimes it just got a bit too much. Or was it just that I liked the more light-hearted scenes better? Perhaps if I’d just lost someone dear to me, I’d have found the book more relatable. The Wakes is a three-star read from me.

Book Review: Thirst for Salt by Madelaine Lucas – a story of melancholy and nostalgia told through the senses

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I confess I had a couple of goes at this novel, which I’d heard such good things about. And it’s not as if it gets off to a slow start. I was soon swept up into the narrator’s story – a woman in her late thirties reminiscing about a relationship from over ten years before, and the man, Jude, whom she’s never quite forgotten.

I imagined some kind of reconciliation, a meeting of some kind. What would they say to each other? How would they feel about each other now? Would such a meeting rekindle old feelings? Would there be new revelations about what really happened?

But that’s not what happens. Thirst For Salt is a journey back to a year in the life of the narrator – do we ever learn her name? – viewed from the point of view of her older self. It’s a journey filled with nostalgia, melancholy and yearning.

Our narrator meets Jude at the beach where she and her mother have rented a cottage for a summer holiday. He’s an older man of 42, compared with the young woman’s 24. She swims a lot on her own and this attracts Jude’s concern – all kinds of creatures lurk in the water, he tells her, and there are no lifeguards at this beach. Sharkbait, he calls her.

The cool shock of the blue. Movement, water, salt, light, heat. I began every day that way, my first week at Sailors Beach. Rising up with the waves and kicking down into the depths, into those sudden cold patches where the sun didn’t reach. Patterns of light on the surface, shadows passing above, water darkening. The fear, sometimes, of something brushing past my leg – a tangle of kelp or a lone gull landing beside me. Rocks seemed to quiver on the silty bed below, and once, I caught sight of a silver ray.


Parallel to their story, is the narrator’s relationship with her mother, who was just 24 when her daughter was born, a relationship that’s almost sisterly. Her mother has always lived a Bohemian kind of life, her long separated father, an itinerant, so learning how a long-term relationship works isn’t easy. By contrast, Jude seems a more solid, settled kind of guy. He’s a man of steady habits, with his own routines. He’s even living in the old family beach house built by his father.

The novel is an intimate portrayal of a relationship that reminded me a little of Sally Rooney’s Normal People. It is also a story that evolves through all the senses – the feeling of the sea on skin, the sights and sounds of the beach, of nature, both summer and winter. There’s taste and scent as well, in the old things Jude has in his house, the meals they prepare together. And the writing is just gorgeous.

As I said, I put this book aside after the first third or so, a little frustrated at the lack of obvious plot. But I still wanted to know how it ended and found myself picking it up again as an audiobook, which in this case was read by the author. It seemed to work and Madelaine Lucas gives a nuanced and engaging performance, capturing perfectly the feelings of loss and sadness that haunt the pages. I’m glad I persevered; Thirst for Salt is a four star read from me.

Book Review: Prettier if She Smiled More by Toni Jordan – another hilarious round with the Schnabels

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I hadn’t realised until I started it, that Toni Jordan’s latest novel features a bunch of the same characters we met in Dinner with the Schnabels – one of my favourite reads from 2022. In Prettier if She Smiled More, we follow the story of Kylie Schnabel who at the start of the book is about to experience three disasters that upend her life – all before Wednesday. By the end of the week, nothing will be the same.

Kylie Schnabel, if you remember, is the oldest sibling, daughter of Schnabel matriarch Gloria. She works as a pharmacist and likes to think she has everything under control. She’s very serious and is a stickler for detail, hardworking and a little abrupt. She’s been working at the same small suburban pharmacy since she graduated, living frugally and planning her life around one day buying the shop from her genial boss Tim who’s approaching retirement.

Life’s all going to plan, until one day it isn’t. Kylie gets to work on Monday to discover that Tim is selling his shop to a chain of pharmacies, a big business conglomerate all set to modernise and refurb. Gail from Pharmacy King insists Kylie reapply for her job – just a formality, and even though Kylie has a work ethic second to none and has won a Young Pharmacist of the Year award, the reader knows it’s going to be tricky. Kylie’s sometimes grim, no-nonsense manner is going to be a problem.

Then there’s Colin, Kylie’s partner, who is supposedly away at a business conference but activity on his Fitbit suggests he’s getting up to some extra-curricular hanky-panky. Kylie suddenly sees unpatchable cracks in their relationship. When Gloria breaks her ankle and needs full-time care, Kylie finds herself back at her childhood home, dealing with a mother who doesn’t want to be looked after and somehow ends up baby-sitting Caesar, a tiny Pomeranian.

There are plenty of funny moments, and Kylie’s internal monologue is always entertaining – she’s such a force of nature. But coming home where the decor is still stuck in the 1980s and there are so many reminders of her childhood, suddenly the past comes back with a wallop. Why has Kylie’s bedroom been turned into a sewing room, while her siblings, Tansy and Nick’s rooms are still intact, just as they left them? Then there’s her parent’s acrimonious divorce and memories of her childhood anguish, of being the eldest and having to be the sensible one when her mother was in pieces.

‘Your … father, is this?’ Ramona said, picking up one of the photos. ‘Is very handsome, but familiar somehow?…
  …In those years before Photoshop, what could be done about David, who was in the centre of many of the said photos and who Gloria wished dead several times a day in a variety of painful ways? Facing the grinning face of her ex-husband every day in her own home was untenable.
  Gloria’s solution had been to cut out a range of Kevin Costner heads of varying sizes from different magazines and glue them over similarly sized David heads. Now the family photos lined up on the mantel were of Gloria and Kevin, standing proudly behind their children, young Kylie, Tansy and Nick.

There’s a lot for Kylie to deal with, all in one week, including a tennis open day for Gloria, who is a children’s tennis coach. There’s finding a nurse who will want to stay with her mother so that she can get back to work when Gloria has other ideas. Kylie’s brother Nick talks her into going on a date with one of his mates. And on top of everything, Kylie has agreed to host the family lunch on Sunday. As the pressure mounts, something has to give.

Prettier if She Smiled More is a smart and often hilarious second-chances kind of novel. The format is similar to Dinner with the Schnabels, with one character having a lot to get done as the days of a single week slip by and each day heralds more problems. The final chapter brings everything to a head and somehow everything gets fixed, but in a way Kylie, the meticulous over-planner, would never have predicted a week earlier. I loved it and wouldn’t say no to another Schnabel novel if Toni Jordan feels so inclined. This one’s gets an easy five out of five stars from me.

Book Review: A Million Things by Emily Spurr – a resilient young heroine struggling with loss

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I was drawn to this book by its compelling storyline – a young girl all alone, trying to pretend nothing is wrong after her mother disappears. Well, that’s how it seemed to start with. The book’s told from the point of view of ten-year-old Rae – but it’s not your standard first-person narrative voice. Often Rae is talking to a ‘you’ – the mother who isn’t there.

It would be easy to assume that the mother is missing because she hasn’t come home. But Rae’s mother has been mentally ill for quite some time. No wonder Rae knows about the routine of managing meals and getting herself to school, of walking Splinter, the dog. Rae has had to be the grown-up a lot of the time. Only this time Rae’s mother has ended her life in the backyard shed. With no one else to turn to, Rae must manage as best she can on her own.

Rae decides to keep going on her own. She becomes adept at keeping up appearances. She gets herself off to school, takes care of the house, and feeds the dog. There’s no time for grief. If only that nosy old lady next door wasn’t always on her front verandah watching. But Lettie has secrets of her own, things she doesn’t want anybody knowing about. It’s only when Rae hears her calling for help one day that the two discover that they need each other.

Each time you’d go, noises muffled and sharpened and silence got loud. I’d stand still, trying not to breathe, waiting for the door to open and for you to come back through it. The silence you left after you grabbed the keys from the bowl on the table and slammed out the door would stand like a person beside me. The bang made me jump every time. Even though I knew it was coming. Knew from the second your eyes lost focus and tightened and you stopped seeing me and saw only this thing ruining your life.

Things become more complicated by the arrival of new people along the street, Oscar who is the same age as Rae, just wants to make friends, but when he parrots critical comments of his mother about Lettie, Rae finds herself sticking up for her neighbour. She doesn’t want social services nosing around.

It is heartbreaking the lengths Rae will go to pretend everything is normal, alleviated in some part by her growing friendship with Lettie. We slowly get pieces of Lettie’s story, her family tragedy. The tension builds as all the plates Rae tries to keep spinning descend one by one and a dramatic event brings help from an unexpected quarter.

This is one of those books that has you holding your breath – you are so much in Rae’s impossible world. The friendly banter between Rae and Lettie lightens things a little, but the old woman’s situation is horrendous as well. You feel how easy it is for life to get on top of you and the book becomes a sensitive portrait of the effects of mental illness, but of resilience as well. The reluctance to let someone else into your life when you need help; of not wanting anything to change. Of holding onto the grief that ensnares you, that keeps the missing loved one there as a constant presence.

A Million Things was shortlisted for the Victorian Premier’s Unpublished Manuscript Prize and won the BookBrowse Best Debut Novel 2021. Emily Spurr is certainly a writer to watch. A Million Things gets four stars from me.

Book Review: Exiles by Jane Harper – Aaron Falk is back in an atmospheric new mystery

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I’ve read all of Jane Harper’s novels. It was possibly her first book, The Dry, that triggered a popular interest in Aussie Noir, giving Scandi Noir a run for its money. For me, it was Jane Harper that got me reading Australian mysteries and I imagine it was the same for many readers. There’s just something special about novels set in the outback.

Since The Dry we’ve had a second Aaron Falk novel – Force of Nature is soon to hit the big screen – and now, a long-awaited third. Exiles sees the Melbourne detective visiting friends in rural wine country for a christening. It’s a bitter-sweet time for Greg Raco’s family. While Aaron is going to be godfather to Raco’s baby boy, nobody can forget what happened at the same time a year ago. The Marralee Valley Annual Food and Wine Festival was on and it was here that Kim Gillespie disappeared, leaving her baby Zoe asleep in her pram.

Kim’s older daughter from her long-term relationship with Charlie Raco, Greg Raco’s winemaker brother, is desperate for answers. Now seventeen, she’s running a campaign, aided by Charlie and her good friend Joel, handing out flyers and canvassing potential eyewitnesses. Aaron, with all his detective smarts, somehow gets roped in.

And there’s another cold case – the hit-and-run death of Joel’s father at the Reservoir, a spot adjacent to the festival grounds, and it’s the Reservoir where Kim’s shoe was found. Is this a coincidence or are the two cases linked? Aaron has the added complication of meeting up with Gemma again, Joel’s mother – someone he’d met through Raco, and who he can’t quite forget.

Even in the gloom Falk could see it stretching out, vast and open in its centre, then twisting and curving to fill the turns and gullies that formed the banks. It was big. Bigger than he remembered. The opposite bank was just visible across the swathe of water, but he couldn’t see the westernmost edge, or the dam that lay somewhere to the east. The festival grounds felt far behind them, but Falk could hear a distant low thrum of music and crowd noise undercutting the stillness.

Emotions are high in this story with two teenagers having lost parents and not having any answers. Aaron’s a bit of a softy and is sympathetic. The story also hearkens back to the events from the school days of Kim and the Racos. Like the current batch of kids from the local high school, the opening night of the wine and food festival was when there was a big party in the woods near the Reservoir, something local cop, Sergeant Dwyer would love to shut down.

There’s a lot going on in each of the characters’ lives, and we slowly get a picture of a community, of complicated loyalties among old friends, old grudges and a fair bit more besides. We haven’t got a dry, scarily hot landscape. But the stunning countryside surrounding the grim spectre of the Reservoir and all its secrets makes for another atmospheric setting.

Add some superb writing, and a twist in the story I didn’t see coming and I’m happy to say that Jane Harper has done it again. Exiles is another cracking read and is satisfying on several levels. I’ve also got a feeling we might see Aaron Falk again – I hope so; he’s a complex and interesting detective. Exiles gets four and a half out of five from me.

Book Review: Wildflowers by Peggy Frew: a haunting, witty and compassionate story about sisters

~ Judith ~ 3 Comments

You can be forgiven for wondering what you’ve got yourself into a few pages in with Wildflowers. The narrator, Nina, is clearly not coping and while she’s brilliant at bringing you into the story, the vivd way her world is brought to the page through all the senses, she seems bent on self-destruction. You can’t help asking yourself, how will she make it through the next three hundred odd pages. Peggy Frew has created a brilliant character study of someone at the end of her rope.

In the past month, Nina has boxed up all her clothes, her curtains, her cooking utensils and anything useful, apart from the frypan and spatula she uses to fry her evening egg, eaten out of the pan. She gets her outfit for the day not from her wardrobe but from bags of donated clothing outside a charity shop, raided under cover of darkness. Nothing fits properly and yet she manages to hold down her admin job at the hospital, the staff cafeteria providing left-overs nicked from newly vacated tables

Her Dunlop Volleys flapped a bit. They were better with the Explorers; Archie McNamara’s socks were too thin. Under the tracksuit pants the seam of the satin shorty things seemed intent on bisecting her, and the lace on the too-tight bra was irritating the skin near her armpits.

What has brought Nina to this? The book flips back to the past to describe the events of Nina’s life and in particular her relationships with her sisters, Meg and Amber. Elder sister Meg was always the sensible one, chastising her laid-back parents over how they allow little sister Amber to run wild. Amber is dazzling, gloriously pretty but also with a charisma that is perfect for the stage and she’s soon a child actor in a film. What happens here eventually drives Amber to drug addiction.

Nina is the smart one, but she’s also a ditherer, uncertain what to do with her life. While Meg chooses her study path and makes a go of it, Nina finds student life daunting, blazing through her studies but strangled by shyness. She doesn’t know how to be.

The tremulous romanticism by which she’d been so strongly affected upon first leaving her family – which she’d always felt, but which in the lonesome splendour of her cobwebbed room and with the aid of her poetry classes had crystalised from a homely, unexplained presence into something not unlike a calling – this had not receded. It was melancholy, that’s exactly what it was: a sadness that was exquisite. She was kind of addicted to it. And she found that she couldn’t – simply could not – reveal this aspect of herself to anyone.

She drifts through unsatisfying relationships with men, a habit that continues well into her adult years. While she’s smart, Nina’s not so good at life so it’s not surprising she leaves the Amber problem to her mother and to Meg – until, that is, after years of Amber problems, Meg enlists Nina’s help in a last ditch attempt to cure their little sister.

The novel is threaded through with humour – I love the description of Nina pretending to listen to Meg’s hectoring voice on the phone while cleaning the grout on the bathroom tiles with baking soda, only to discover she’s out of white vinegar and furtively googling whether or not balsamic would work instead. Not everyone enjoys this odd mix of despair with wit – Meg Mason’s utterly splendid Sorrow and Bliss seemed to polarise readers – but for me it it works a treat.

Throw in some lovely, evocative writing – whether describing the rainforest retreat where the girls try to cure Amber, student flats or city scapes, Frew brings Nina’s world to life. This makes her story seem very real and adds to the huge compassion we feel for her as readers. I love this sort of book, and can happily add Peggy Frew’s name to a list I’m gathering of Australian authors, which include Charlotte Wood and Toni Jordan, as well as New Zealand born Meg Mason, who I’m keen to read again. Wildflowers gets a full five stars from me.

Book Review: The Place on Dalhousie by Melina Marchetta – a warm-hearted novel about finding family where you least expect it

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I picked this book up as it was recommended by a librarian, my final task in the Turn Up the Heat winter reading challenge at the library. The Place on Dalhousie came out in 2019, and I am reminded a little of the first book I read by Marchetta – Looking for Alibrandi, published in 1992 – with its strong Australian sense of place and memorable characters.

In the recent book we have three main characters flung together by circumstances trying to make the best of things. Rosie Genarro is a care-giver in rural Queensland when she meets Jimmy in the middle of a natural disaster. He’s part of the rescue team when Rosie has to get her recalcitrant elderly client out of her home before floods destroy it. Two years later she’s back in Sydney with a baby, living in her parents’ house. Only her parents are both dead – Rosie’s still mourning her father – and she’s in a stand-off with her stepmother, Martha, over who owns the house. Jimmy is nowhere to be seen.

Martha is also still grieving Seb, who according to Rosie, she married far too soon after the death of her mother. Martha has a high-pressure job, and is desperate for some leave. She’s also a prickly, difficult woman, and sharing her home with her step-daughter and her unsettled baby is ramping up her stress levels. Somehow she gets dragged into a netball team with her old schoolmates, coached by a faded footy star and former schoolgirl crush, the once more single brother of one of her mates.

When Jimmy finds his long-lost phone, he discovers he’s also a father. He travels to Sydney to meet his son and perhaps to make things right with Rosie. It’s not all plain sailing, though. He’s working in the mining industry in Perth, bunking in with friends on the weeks he’s rostered off. Rosie is distrustful and it will take a lot to win her over. Both are very young and have dreams of a new career path – Rosie as a midwife; Jimmy as a paramedic. But study is expensive and so is renting a place in Sydney. They are really up against it.

As I said, Marchetta is really strong on characters. I loved Martha’s netball mates, and the awkward friendships Rosie makes with the two other misfits from a mother’s coffee group. Even the house – the place on Dalhousie – has a personality. It epitomises all the family love that has gone into turning it from a the rundown ‘worst house in the street’ to something special. No wonder neither Martha or Rosie want to part with it. The story builds to a brilliant ending with a couple of nice twists.

Marchetta is a dab-hand with smart, funny dialogue, capturing the characters and also the voices of Australians of European descent, particularly the Italians. Martha’s of German descent so there’s that too. You get a great sense of place, whether it’s rural Queensland or suburban Sydney. Now that I’ve read her first book and much more recently her latest, I’m wondering why I haven’t read anything in between. I’m giving this book a four out of five.

Book Review: Dinner with the Schnabels by Toni Jordan – a brilliant, warm-hearted comedy

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I love a funny novel, particularly a character driven comedy like this one, which I also imagine would make a terrific movie. Like many comedies, its main character, in this case Simon Larsen, is in trouble. The Covid crisis hit him hard financially. For the last eighteen months he’s had to deal with losing the family home, his architectural business and his self-respect. Now, once he’s got the kids off to school, he struggles to get off the couch. He adores his wife Tansey, who has stepped up as the breadwinner, but if only her family weren’t so superior.

These are the Schnabels of the title: Tansy’s sister Kylie who is career-driven and blunt to the point of rudeness; brother Nick, a good looking former footie star who is forgiven everything by doting mother Gloria. It is always Gloria who calls the shots, and who makes Simon feel even more of a failure.

The Schnabels decide it’s time to hold a memorial service for Tansy’s father who died two years ago but didn’t get the usual send-off because of Covid. They also decide the best place to hold it is in Tansy’s friend Naveen’s garden. But the landscape gardeners Naveen had employed have abandoned the job and left him high and dry. So Simon is asked do the work instead. He’ll earn some cash and get himself off the couch. He has a whole week to accomplish the job so no pressure.

The story is set over the week leading up to the memorial service as events occur to derail Simon’s plans to work in Naveen’s garden. The book begins with Simon’s first day on the job – only Simon’s late because he and Tansy are at the train station. Tansy wants to catch a glimpse of Monica who is arriving by train for the service. Monica is Tansey’s half-sister, the younger offspring of the father who did a bunk, the child he stayed around for. The reader can’t help but wonder why there’s all this effort to create the perfect memorial service for the man who had so little to do with Tansy, Kylie and Nick, the man who ran out on Gloria.

Tansy only wants to see what her younger sister looks like, but bubbly, affectionate Monica ends up catching a lift, and somehow staying with Tansy and Simon. The Larsens live in a poky, two-bedroom flat, but Monica soon settles in, a big, confident personality, determined to make the most of her time in the city. Meanwhile the pressure is on Simon to get on with Naveen’s garden as more and more disasters throw him off-course. Along the way, snippets of Simon’s former life emerge, and in spite of all the disasters, the true character of Simon begins to shine through.

Dinner with the Schnabels is a very Australian comedy – we’re in Melbourne – but the themes are universal. The Covid crisis and its economic fallout, the hero with his one shot at redemption struggling with his demons, the importance of family and the way that blood is thicker than water, even if you don’t always like them very much.. The story builds to a surprising and satisfying ending, as Simon deals with curve-ball after curve-ball. Simon himself is a terrific narrator, far from perfect but oddly likeable. The prose is smart and witty, the dialogue always entertaining. I loved this book and now want to read everything by Toni Jordan. So this novel definitely gets a five out of five from me.

Book Review: The Weekend by Charlotte Wood

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This is such a different sort of novel from Wood’s earlier work, The Natural Way of Things, which was a dystopian novel with an underlying tone of menace. I thought it was a stunning read and was happy to hear she had a new book out. The Weekend is a more character driven novel, told with wit and insight, following three women in their seventies who have lost their former glory, are bitter or desperate – is it too late to recover, recharge and reinvent themselves?

The women are old friends who are missing the fourth of their circle, Sylvie, who has recently died. They gather at Sylvie’s beach house just on Christmas to clean it and clear out the junk, ready to sell. First there’s Jude – she’s the bossy one who likes things done properly. She’s worked in a fashionable restaurant, makes a terrific pavlova, and has been the mistress of a wealthy married man for decades. After the house clear-out, she and David will steal a precious few days together. Jude is the first to arrive, but where are the other two? So typical of them to let her down.

We catch up with Wendy, who has car trouble, sweltering as she waits for the breakdown service – we’re in Australia and Christmas is in summer. Adding to her discomfort is her ancient dog, Finn, seventeen, blind, deaf and incontinent – a raft of conditions that make him constantly fretful. If only Wendy would listen to her daughter and have the dog put down. But Finn has been her consolation ever since her husband passed away. It’s hard to imagine Wendy is an academic of some repute who has written books on feminism that have been received with widespread critical acclaim.

Then there’s Adele, an actress who keeps missing the train, facing a bunch of problems including imminent homelessness, and a lack of available stage roles which is galling for someone who dazzled with her Blanche DuBois, Mother Courage, Lady Macbeth – so many brilliant performances. Then there’s the lack of cash – at least she’s well turned out, her figure still good for her age, her stunning breasts still shapely, her recent pedicure money well-spent.

Most often when Adele was exposed, or shamed, she turned for courage to the moment every actor knew: the moment on stage, entirely yours, waiting in the pitch-dark before the lights came up, the most powerful privacy a person could have. The fear drained away and adrenaline replaced it, and you were ready on your mark, in the darkness….In that moment of taut, pure potential, everything, everyone, was yours.

Jude doesn’t expect a lot from Adele, but has made a list none the less and the three crack on, each imagining the past, their petty grievances, their fears and insecurities. They don’t seem to be getting along at all – was it only Sylvie who kept them all connected?

The Weekend is a wonderful story about friendship and the odd ties that bind it, the feelings that threaten to break it, told in brilliant, witty prose. I hadn’t expected to like it as much as I did, but found myself drawn into a story about three women in the autumn years of their lives – a time when there may not be many more chances for new horizons, but still, who knows? There is just enough plot to keep things bubbling along, with some revelations towards the end that bring things to a head.

I loved the way Wood creates physical discomfort that mirrors the discomfort of the characters’ interactions: the rusty inclinator – a lift-like contrivance that clunks its passengers up to the house; a drenching storm; Wendy’s uncomfortable sandals; Adele caught out needing a pee at the beach with no facilities in sight; anything to do with the dog, Finn. And clearing out a house you have all those years of accumulated junk – the flotsam and jetsam that make a life – now decaying and useless.

It all adds up to a brilliant read, which reminded me a little of Jane Gardam, another writer who has created some brilliant older characters (see Old Filth trilogy), or maybe it was the similar wry tone. The Weekend earned Wood a spot on the Stella Prize shortlist and I will be keeping her on my radar, eager to see what she comes up with next. A four and a half out of five read from me.

Historical Novels in the Spotlight: The Walter Scott Shortlist

~ Judith ~ 2 Comments

Being a lover of historical fiction, the Walter Scott Prize is a highlight of my reading year, bringing to my attention some stunning new authors and reminding me of some old favourites. This year’s shortlist has already got a couple of books on my To-Read List, but the others look amazing as well. And three of the short-listed books are by Australian authors, which is also pretty interesting. Here’s a quick summary.

First among the Aussies is The Tolstoy Estate by Steven Conte. During the German invasion of Russia in WWII, Paul Bauer is the doctor tasked to set up a field hospital at the former estate of Leo Tolstoy. Evoking the French invasion under Napoleon which is a key element in Tolstoy’s War and Peace, the story describes Paul’s troubled relationship with hostile, aristocratic Katerina, and the unhinged behaviour of Paul’s commanding officer. ‘A poignant, bittersweet love story – and, most movingly, a novel that explores the notion that literature can still be a potent force for good in our world,’ says the blurb. Sounds a goodie to me.

The second Aussie novelist to make the list (we’re strictly alphabetical here) is old hand Kate Grenville and her new book A Room Made of Leaves. The book is a kind of imagined memoir by Elizabeth Macarthur, wife of a notorious Sydney wool baron back during the early colonial days, describing her marriage to a ruthless bully. The book gives her a voice and according to the blurb is ‘a playful dance of possibilities between the real and the invented’. Grenville who penned the terrific Secret River trilogy, is brilliant at colonial history, but is an original writer too, so it’s not surprising this book has made the lists of several book prizes.

The Mirror and the Light by Hilary Mantel is the final book in the trilogy about Thomas Cromwell, who was the guy that made things happen for Henry VIII – his divorce from Catherine of Aragon, Henry’s becoming the head of the Church of England, and so on. Mantel has a vivid present tense style which makes the history all come alive and shows Cromwell, the blacksmith’s son who rose to immense power, from all sides. The last book will deal with his downfall, which probably won’t be pretty, and which is why, in spite of enjoying the previous two in the trilogy, I have yet to pick up the third. But it’s only a matter of time. Once I start reading, I know I’ll be hooked.

Hamnet by Maggie O’Farrell describes events when William Shakespeare is away working in London and his twin children fall ill with a fever. Like many of O’Farrell’s novels Hamnet is sure to be original and difficult to describe so here is what the publisher says about it: ‘It is a story of the bond between twins, and of a marriage pushed to the brink by grief. It is also the story of a kestrel and its mistress; a flea that boards a ship in Alexandria; and a glovemaker’s son who flouts convention in pursuit of the woman he loves. Above all, it is a tender and unforgettable reimagining of a boy whose life has been all but forgotten, but whose name was given to one of the most celebrated plays ever written.’ This sounds mesmerising and since I always enjoy Maggie O’Farrell’s novels this one’s been on my To-Read List for a wee while.

Finally, with our third Aussie contender, we’ve The Dictionary of Lost Words by Pip Williams. It’s the story of Esme, daughter of one of the compilers of the first ever Oxford English Dictionary. Motherless and left to her own devices, Esme decides to gather together all the words the compilers leave out of the dictionary for being in some way ‘objectionable’. Words like ‘bondmaid’ are tossed aside. This and other discards seem to relate to women or the lower classes. The story is set at the time of the women’s suffrage movement and with a world war looming, we know all sorts of social change is just around the corner. As a person who always likes to have an OED to hand and having heard great things about it, I’m eager to read this one. And another pretty cover too.