Based on a successful puppet stage show, The Grimstones: Hatched is a charming gothic fairytale, and the first book in a new fantasy series for readers aged eight to 12. Hatched is the secret diary of Martha Grimstone, a girl determined to discover her special talent and to find a spell that will cure her mother’s sadness. But sneaking into her grandfather’s apothecary to experiment with his healing herbs proves tricky, especially when Martha has to spend three hours a day being tutored by her tedious Aunt Gertrude. In this book adaptation, author and performer Asphyxia takes a suitably creative approach to transplanting her handcrafted puppet characters from stage to page. Hatched sets itself apart from numerous other children’s fantasy novels with its quirky visuals—a beguiling combination of words, drawings, and photos that give it a scrapbook feel. Martha is an engaging and lively narrator, and the images that fill her diary give a wonderful sense of the unique world she inhabits. Despite its gothic leanings, Hatched is light-hearted and sweet, and full of imaginative touches: Martha fashions fantastic household inventions from found objects, and her seamstress mother lines her garments with love. This is an original title that promises—and delivers—something a little different.

Carody Culver is a freelance reviewer, PhD student and bookseller at Black Cat Books in Brisbane. This review first appeared in the Summer issue of Bookseller+Publisher magazine.

Tags: Allen & Unwin, Asphyxia, Carody Culver, Hatched, The Grimstones Category Reviews |

The Chemistry of Tears is the 12th novel by two-time Booker Prize winner Peter Carey, and it’s a welcome addition to the substantial oeuvre of one of Australia’s finest prose stylists. After returning to the 19th century in his previous novel, Parrot and Olivier in America, he half stays there in this work, telling parallel stories that switch back and forth between the 19th and 21st centuries.

The first narrator we meet is Catherine Gehrig, a grieving conservator at the fictional Swinburne Museum in modern-day London, who is given the task of restoring a clockwork automaton that is apparently a replica of the mechanical duck designed by Jacques de Vaucanson in 1739. Included with the parts are the notebooks of the man who commissioned the replica, Henry Brandling, a wealthy member of a railroad dynasty who conceives of the automaton as a gift to cheer his beloved but ailing son. Catherine reads the notebooks and the chapters alternate between her story and Henry’s, as he travels to Germany to find a clockmaker who can reproduce the remarkable feat of Vaucanson. Once there he finds the mysterious Herr Sumper, a brute of a man who speaks in riddles and may be a genius or a charlatan and who agrees to make the automaton, but produces something that is not entirely expected.

The dual narrative is something that Carey has employed in several of his most recent novels, including Parrot and Olivier in America, His Illegal Self and Theft: A Love Story. In this case, with the present-day character researching a somewhat mysterious 19th-century past, it also has overtones of A S Byatt’s Possession. There is nothing quite so neat as the resolution of Byatt’s novel here though, as the narrative proceeds through confusions and misunderstandings and hints at things that are simply beyond our comprehension. There’s something off-kilter about both of the narrators that Carey captures in a jumpy prose style, and there are hints of madness in several of the characters. Catherine reads Henry’s narrative and realises that ‘what was initially confusing would never be clarified no matter how hard you stared and swore at it’ and the experience is not dissimilar for the reader of this novel, but Carey has long traded in ambiguities and like his previous novels, this is a gripping read.

Fans of Carey (and they are legion) will snap this one up and it should attract widespread attention in the literary world. Look for it to feature on prize shortlists next year.

Blair Mahoney teaches English, Literature and Philosophy at Melbourne High School and is the author of Poetry Reloaded, a textbook for secondary students. This review first appeared in the Summer issue of Bookseller+Publisher magazine.

Tags: Blair Mahoney, Hamish Hamilton, Peter Carey, The Chemistry of Tears Category Reviews |

Published five years ago, Carrie Tiffany’s Everyman’s Rules for Scientific Living was a remarkably assured debut novel, recognised as such by the Miles Franklin and Orange Prize judges. She has brought the same clear-eyed intelligence about human relations and seamless narrative style to her second novel, Mateship with Birds. We are in familiar territory, in rural Victoria, this time post WWII rather than WWI. Harry is a divorced dairy farmer, living alone. His next-door neighbour, Betty, is a single mother of two who works at the town’s nursing home. We follow the vicissitudes of Harry and Betty’s daily and seasonal lives through their interactions, and those of Betty’s children, as well as through a window into the inner lives of both. The ‘mateship’ of the title, captured through the birdwatching episodes which feature throughout, is also a deceptive device, as Harry watches (and lusts after) Betty. At the same time, he earnestly attempts to give her son the s-x education he is so aware he himself lacked. This is a splendidly poised and wryly funny novel: human nature and relationships are as beautifully observed as the rich, circadian rhythms (I’ve not read better prose about the intimate intricacy of dairy farming) of country life. It is clever, original and richly rewarding.

David Gaunt is co-owner of Gleebooks in Sydney. This review first appeared in the Summer issue of Bookseller+Publisher magazine.

Tags: Carrie Tiffany, Macmillan, Mateship with Birds Category Reviews |

Seventeen-year-old Dodie Farnshaw just wanted to finish high school, sit her Year 12 exams and get on with the rest of her life. Delivering a very important dead guy to Sydney just two weeks before her final exams was not in the plan. Neither was her parents going missing, becoming a fugitive and falling in love. And she certainly wasn’t anticipating a road trip that would change her life. Funny, vibrant and at times incredibly moving, The Reluctant Hallelujah is a beautiful novel about finding faith in the strangest of places. With a quirky cast of characters, this novel captures a wide range of relationships and skilfully explores that time in a teenager’s life when everything is changing. Sharp, clever and surprisingly amusing for a book about a dead man, Gabrielle William’s latest YA adventure is a bittersweet story filled with characters you’ll never want to leave behind, and a road trip you’ll wish was your own. This book will appeal to a 15-plus age group, and is a must-read for fans of William’s widely acclaimed first YA novel, Beatle Meets Destiny.

Meg Whelan works at the Hill of Content bookshop in Melbourne. This review first appeared in the Summer issue of Bookseller+Publisher magazine.

Tags: Gabrielle Williams, Meg Whelan, penguin, The Reluctant Hallelujah Category Reviews |

Melbourne writer, blogger and bookseller A S Patrić tells David Cohen about his short-story collection The Rattler and Other Stories (Spineless Wonders). (See David Cohen’s review here.)

There are some strong links, thematic and otherwise, between many of these stories. Were they written with a collection in mind?
Perhaps I’m too bookish but I think we experience our lives in story sequences. We search for links and themes in a narrative so large we never get to see the whole thing at once. When we notice patterns and connections we are getting glimpses of a bigger picture. So that’s how I write my stories—as parts of a very large book, and The Rattler & Other Stories is chapter one.

In many of your stories, seemingly innocuous details are set against sinister or unsettling events and thereby take on an eerie, cinematic quality; for example, the image of headphones hanging from an armrest in the story ‘B O M B S’. Do your stories emerge from such images, or do you employ them to create a particular mood?
A detail like those headphones comes from an idea, more than an intention to juxtapose or to create an effect. ‘B O M B S’ is an explosion and each piece of it is a fragment. The headphones hanging from an armrest on a crashing plane (music tinkling amid the noise of destruction) is about how we collect moments into something like music (or literature) and comfort ourselves with the idea that a piece of ourselves or something we love might survive forever. So perhaps all we have are fragments—the bits and pieces of our exploding lives. ‘B O M B S’ emerged from that idea.

Of late, there seems to be a renewed enthusiasm, particularly from small independent publishers such as Affirm Press and Spineless Wonders, for short fiction or short-story collections. You’re a bookseller as well as a writer; are more people buying these formats?
Everyone involved in bookselling knows we’re in a critical period of transition and what readers are going to buy, even in the near future, is uncertain. An award like the Miles Franklin has degenerated to a point where an increase in sales, even for the winner, is negligible, since the award insists on traditional forms and themes. The Pulitzer is bolder, and the prize’s successes have been far more impressive with books like Olive Kitteridge and A Visit from the Goon Squad—both of which are linked story collections. Independent publishing is part of the seismic changes we’re experiencing. Those that have the nous and gumption will thrive in a market that is demanding diversity and bravery. Your local bookstore has never been a more exciting place.

Tags: A S Patric, David Cohen, Spineless Wonders, The Rattler and Other Stories Category Interviews |

High on a hill, a little old man and a little old lady live together in a house. One evening the little old man looks up at the moon and some questions enter his mind: Does the sky go on forever and ever? Where do we come from? Where do we go, and why are we here? The next morning his loving wife sets off to find some answers for him, asking those she meets along the road. While this might sound like rather heavy subject matter for a picture book, the tone is lightened by the fact that those who answer the little old lady’s questions are in fact a rooster, a cow, a pig and a duck. The illustrations are in Pamela Allen’s signature style, with the same style of introspection as her picture book The Toymaker and the Bird. This story could equally be read as a straight story for younger children, or as a starting point for a deeper discussion between parent and child.

Amelia Vahtrick is the children’s book buyer at Better Read Than Dead in Newtown. This review first appeared in the Summer issue of Bookseller+Publisher magazine.

Tags: Amelia Vahtrick, Better Read Than Dead, Pamela Allen, The Little Old Man Who Looked Up at the Moon, Viking Category Reviews |

Gillian Mears (credit Shannon Hemmings)

Gillian Mears grew up horse mad and horse-book mad. She spoke to Heather Dyer about her latest novel, Foal’s Bread (A&U). (See the review here.)

You obviously have a great love of horses. How important have they been in your life? Have you got any favourite horse books’?
In the company of a charitable horse there is nothing that you can’t learn deeply and intricately about yourself. Horses have been the greatest teachers of my life. From the age of 9 to 16 nothing was more important to me and some of my sisters than time spent with our horses. The seasons would pretty much determine what we’d be doing, and my favourite season of all was summer, when you’d ride bareback down for a swim at the Spit on the Clarence River. The horses were indolent, with grass bellies and sun-faded coats. Swimming your horse lent a magical quality of power to any afternoon. So too the stop that always followed a swim, at the long-gone Villiers St corner shop for a little whitepaper bag of mixed lollies that certain horses also loved to eat. The first horse book I can remember reading was Right Royal by John Masefield. It had been one of my English grandmother’s books. It held many line drawings as well as beautiful tissue-guarded colour plates. Next probably would’ve been Anna Sewell’s Black Beauty followed by Mary O’Hara’s ‘Wyoming’ trilogy and some of Elyne Mitchell’s ‘Silver Brumby’ and Mary Grant Bruce’s ‘Billabong’ books. If a book had a horse on the cover it was greeted with potential reverence, confirmed once you verified that it wasn’t a ridiculous horse-girl book. When I first read John Steinbeck’s classic The Red Pony I was deeply affected because my best friend’s pony had just had strangles and not long after that died a terrible death from tetanus. I loved the horses that appeared as a matter of course in many of Nan Chauncy’s novels. There was also the mare Bless in a Herman Hesse, and Bree and Hwin, the Narnian horses from C S Lewis’s The Horse and His Boy, and most recently of all, Nino from The Crossing, stabbed in the breast by a Mexican bandit. Henry Wynmalen’s Equitation was borrowed almost constantly from Grafton High School library by one Mears girl or another. I also often took out anthologies of horse stories that yielded gems such as D H Lawrence’s ‘Rocking Horse Winner’, a favourite to this day. After leaving home, my dream of becoming a better rider never abated. I was learning many marvellous things with Bellini, the last horse in my life, an ex-racehorse from Queensland, when the onset of MS when I was 31 stopped the lessons dead in their tracks.

Jealousy between Minna and her daughter-in- law Noah, and then between Noah and her daughter Lainey, threaten to destroy their relationships. Do you find jealousy an interesting emotion to write about?
The very word jealousy seems alive. Like a snake gliding into a house there is a feeling of danger, danger! I once saw a king brown snake that had found its way into the vacuum cleaner bag under a child’s bed. The mother threw snake and bag into a cauldron of water coming to the boil on the stove. I feel that in Foal’s Bread, no jealousy shines with such reptilian glossiness as that that breaks out in Noah for her beloved daughter. I found that those chapters unpeeled from my pen with little need of rewriting. Older writings of mine have also investigated the sly and malignant force that is jealousy.

Some of the characters, in particular Minna, could have been deeply unsympathetic, but you manage to keep her just this side of that. Was this difficult to achieve?
I found Minna’s humanity shone out in one startling similarity to Noah—both women in different parts of the book feel ashamed to cry. This poignant recognition made it possible to maintain the relentless portrayal of the flinty, mean old Minna.

Your previous novels and short stories have won many awards, including the Vogel Award and several Commonwealth Writers’ Prizes. Did these awards offer you more freedom, or did they put pressure on you as a writer?
It’s hard to answer this question with unequivocal certainty. Although at one level the prizes came always as a genuine surprise, somewhere deeper in I would accept that they were emphasising that writing was my rightful destiny. The most stress I’ve ever felt in my writing life happened when completing The Grass Sister. This was due to a basic mistrust in my material. I was struggling to find the story I really needed to tell. This rather than any pressure from any prize is what delayed The Grass Sister’s completion by many months.

There appears to be a trend in Australian literary fiction for historical novels with a rural setting. What was it about this time and place that appealed to you?
In many ways writing reminds me of riding an old familiar horse. One wisdom text that always faces out on my bookshelf is equestrian Paul Belasik’s Riding towards the Light (Robert Hale). I’ve always thought that it could just as easily be called Writing towards the Light. Or I’ve thought that writing fiction is like whip-cracking, letting the plaited leather float out in front of you before bringing it back with an almighty crack. I let the whip of Foal’s Bread float out for so many years that I nearly never brought it back. Finally though, my lifelong love and unerring affection for men and women born between the wars demanded that I narrate my novel using their vocabulary. I’ve always loved the great storytelling abilities of that generation. I think of the loneliness and hominess of their old huts. I hear their slow, heart-broken voices, even as they’re telling some incredible story (their voice like a race being called, up and down, up and down) that will practically split you in two with laughter. I wanted to catch the kindness and never-ending generosity of that generation. Certain old horsemen would never charge money to hog your horse’s mane before disappearing for a while on a spree that would leave them high and dry and nearly dead on the bed for days. In conclusion, although I grew up in the 60s and 70s, it’s as if the sound of an earlier era runs in my blood like an old kero pump choot-choot-choot.

What the last book you read and loved?
The Crossing, which is the second volume in Cormac McCarthy’s ‘The Border Trilogy’.

Tags: A&U, Allen & Unwin, Foal’s Bread, Gillian Mears, Heather Dyer Category Interviews |

Within the first few pages of The Genome Generation I realised how ignorant I was about the world of scientific research. It didn’t matter, as Elizabeth Finkel offers an excellent explanation of the science of genomes through clever metaphor, which goes beyond the clichéd notion of genomes representing the complexity of a computer. This is not to say that The Genome Generation is pitched at a basic level. Finkel spends a lot of time looking to the future to consider the likely progression of genome research. She examines current debates regarding the potential of genome research, particularly in the field of developing a vaccine for HIV/AIDS, and the ancestral genetic makeup that may be of crucial importance. Finkel also offers readers advice on how to apply the science of genomes to their everyday lives, for example, through the effects of environment on offspring, and warns of the dangers of ‘dabbling where you don’t understand the controls of the system’. Finkel writes that her aim is to ‘empower the reader to know what to ask’ of genomes and in this task she has certainly succeeded. Her wit, knowledge and fascination with the intricacies of genomes is evident, and quite frankly, contagious.

Megan Hancock is a bookseller at Ellison Hawker Bookshop in Tasmania. This review first appeared in the Summer issue of Bookseller+Publisher magazine.

Tags: Elizabeth Finkel, Melboourne University Publishing, MUP, The Genome Generation Category Reviews |

Ray Martin’s Favourites (Victory) is a collection of standout interviews from the TV journalist’s career, as well as a glimpse behind the scenes, revealing how these interviews came together. Martin spoke to Bookseller+Publisher.

You’ve interviewed many of the stars, including Sophia Loren, Audrey Hepburn and Don Bradman. Have you ever been star struck?
Very rarely. In fact, out of thousands of interviews probably only twice. Sir Donald Bradman and Audrey Hepburn—a strange double, I must admit. I’m a cricket tragic but I never got to see The Don play. When I first met him at his Adelaide suburban house he stood up and stroked an imaginary cover drive, illustrating a point about batting technique. I was absolutely mesmerised. Audrey Hepburn I had fallen in love with when I was about 15 and saw her in the movie Breakfast at Tiffany’s. When I was the ABC’s New York correspondent in the 1970s, I used to walk past the iconic jewellery store and imagine Holly Golightly and her cat, as in the film, just sitting on the steps. Then on The Midday Show I got to meet and interview Audrey. She was still a classic beauty, with sparkling eyes and the best cheekbones in Hollywood. I told her of my teenage love affair, she smiled and purred, ‘It’s never too late …’ So I kissed her on the cheek. How dashing was that?

Which interview was the hardest to secure?
Sir Donald Bradman. How I ended up with that exclusive is almost worth a book in itself. I guess my half-hour interview with Prince Charles after his split with Diana was a coup too. Then the interview with Bob Hawke and Paul Keating together was something quite special. Even 20 years later it’s still my favourite political interview. It’s also a fascinating insight into the two men.

Your book also reveals some of the behind-the-scenes action. Can you share any gossip?
We had an American rock legend stoned off his face when he came on to sing; an Australian movie legend overloaded with chardonnay; a British legend who had a personal water-taster (just in case someone tried to spike his acqua minerale); an English guest who forgot or deliberately decided not to wear knickers on The Midday Show and the TV audience noticed; and a Spanish heartthrob who made sure we didn’t film his bald patch. Then there was Pamela Stephenson who tried to take my trousers off on camera, and Richard Marx, who was too cool to admit that he’d once written a country song for Kenny Rogers. Even after a viewer sent in a copy of the album he still denied it was him. I’m not going to tell you who they were—except for Pamela and Richard. You’ll have to just wonder.

Tell us about some of the ‘ordinary folk’ who made it into this book?
They’re all ordinary in their own kind of way—even Don Bradman, who almost drowned three times because he never learnt to swim. There was the drover who spent an agonising night in the fork of a tree during the high-point of a Queensland flood—with his kelpie dog and a huge snake. Then there was Werner Von Braun, whose rockets put man on the moon but was as enthusiastic as a kid playing with fire crackers; Jane Fonda who wanted to talk about God and Dustin Hoffman who just wanted to talk about sex. Ronnie Biggs, the most celebrated of the Great Train Robbers was an ordinary Cockney bloke, who was one of my favourites. He just wanted to be a carpenter living in Melbourne. Doesn’t get much more ordinary than that.

Tags: Ray Martin, Ray Martin's Favourites, Victory Category Interviews |

Kirsten Tranter’s second novel—following The Legacy—is the story of a group of college friends who travel together each year to Las Vegas. Dylan, the charismatic confidante of the group, the keeper of secrets and solver of problems, has died in an accident, so the remaining four friends plan the annual trip. Elliot, an erudite yet awkward English lecturer, narrates the novel. He is the most naïve of the group, so his perspective makes it easy for the reader to slip into the group and share disgust at Cameron and Brian’s hypocrisy, concern over Tallis’ drinking, and to wonder: what holds these friendships together? There are similarities in this story to The Legacy: both share a naïve, lovelorn and lost character driven by the absence of a friend who still seems all too present. A Common Loss is a potent story of secrets, love, friendship and the bonds that keep people close; in the case of these friends it is a shared history that also threatens to destroy them. Brimming with blackmail and deception and laced with grief, poetry, simmering emotional tension and relationships both budding and exhausted, Tranter’s second novel does not disappoint.

Portia Lindsay works at UNSW Bookshop. This review first appeared in the Summer issue of  Bookseller+Publisher magazine.

Tags: A Common Loss, Fourth Estate, Kirsten Tranter Category Reviews |