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Reviewers’ top picks from the current issue


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Posted: 15 October 2010 at 2:41 pm

In the November issue of Bookseller+Publisher magazine Avid Reader’s Paul Landymore was mightily impressed with Brendan Cowell’s How It Feels (Picador, November), a debut novel that opens in Cronulla in the early ’90s and follows central character Neil as he decides to study theatre in Bathurst. ‘Given that Cowell is a well-known actor (who also grew up in Cronulla and studied theatre in Bathurst), it would be natural to look for the autobiography in this story, but the characters are strong enough to tell their own stories,’ writes Landymore. ‘The characters are well defined and the connections between them true, difficult and sometimes inexplicable—so like life itself.’

Also in fiction, Kimberley Allsopp predicts Kate Morton’s fans will not be disappointed by The Distant Hours (A&U, November)—’an engrossing tale full of secrets waiting to be told’. Likewise, those who enjoyed Death Most Definite, the first in Trent Jamieson’s ‘Deathworks’ series will enjoy his follow-up Managing Death (Orbit, December), with Coaldrakes’ Chris McDonough writing that it ‘really picks up the pace’ from its predecessor.

In nonfiction, Max Oliver admires Street Fight in Naples (A&U, October), Peter Robb’s history of a ‘great and terrible city’ with a focus on the 16th and 17th centuries. ‘Don’t expect an easy read: do expect to be informed, entertained and transported to a particularly resilient people and place,’ says Oliver.

Landymore also reviewed Chris Bray’s The 1000 Hour Day for us (Pier 9, November). One-time ‘Young Adventurer of the Year’ Bray and a friend embarked on a 1000km walk across Victoria Island in the Canadian Arctic—’a feat the locals cheerfully tell them on arrival will result in their deaths,’ Landymore explains. ‘If you like tales of derring-do in the company of charming, enthusiastic companions, then this book is for you,’ he writes. (more…)

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Top picks from the current issue


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Posted: 17 September 2010 at 2:45 pm

Which books got good reviews in the October issue of Bookseller+Publisher you ask?

Well…

The proof copy of Caroline Overington’s novel I Came to Say Goodbye came covered in glowing quotes from Random House staff who’ve read the book and our reviewer Scott Whitmont has joined the chorus. He calls the novel ‘a gripping blockbuster that booksellers can recommend unreservedly’ and predicts Overington’s following ‘is destined to grow in leaps and bounds’.

Toni Whitmont was impressed with That Deadman Dance by Miles Franklin winner Kim Scott (Picador, October), suggesting it will ‘surely attract consideration for a raft of major prizes’. ‘While the story is compelling,’ writes Whitmont, ‘what makes this an extraordinary book is the writing. Scott’s prose shimmers.’

Andrew Wilkins was equally taken with a collection of work by the late Dorothy Porter. Love Poems (Black Inc., October) ‘brings together poems and song lyrics from across Porter’s career, gathered into sections that suggest love in its various phases’ and is ‘simply an essential collection of Australian poetry,’ says Wilkins.

Other eagerly awaited books being reviewed in this issue include Tim Flannery’s Here On Earth (Text, October), which Eliza Metcalf says is ‘an important read’. ‘Flannery traces our species’ evolution and expansion out of Africa and across the globe, noting the trail of destruction we left in our wake,’ she writes. ’The picture he paints is a fairly devastating one, but also quite awe-inspiring.’

Paul Landymore assures readers that When Colts Ran, the new novel by Roger McDonald (Vintage, November), lives up to expectations raised by the author’s Miles Franklin win in 2006. ‘If you’re a fan of Australian literature then I’m sure you will find this book, as I did, a deeply satisfying read,’ writes Landymore.

Deborah Crabtree, our regular music book columnist, was taken with Paul Kelly’s How to Make Gravy (Hamish Hamilton, October), a book that grew out of series of performances Kelly put on in 2004. ‘Part memoir, part tour diary, part song-writing manual, this sprawling book is filled with all manner of letters, lists, confessions, hymns and yarns,’ writes Crabtree, adding that the book gives Kelly ‘space to explore his storytelling skills further, which he does admirably, weaving in and out of the past and present easily and with an intimacy that invites the reader into his world’.

And that’s not to mention Lloyd Jones’ Hand Me Down World (Text, October), Kate Holden’s The Romantic (Text, October), Things Bogans Like (E C McSween et al, Hachette, November), Toni Jordan’s Fall Girl (Text, October), and many, many more…

To hear about this kind of thing waaaay early, sign up for our fortnightly newsletter here.

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‘The September Issue’


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Posted: 13 August 2010 at 2:59 pm

Every time we say that we feel like Anna Wintour, and then we thank our lucky stars that instead of shoes, handbags and frocks, we are instead surrounded by manuscripts, advance reading copies and piles of beautiful books.

So, what’s in the September issue of Bookseller+Publisher we hear you ask? What will the trendsetters be reading in Spring/Summer 2010/11?

Well, Monica McInerney‘s new novel At Home With the Templetons (Michael Joseph, October) went down very well with Rachel Wilson, who is ‘very happy to report that the wait has been worth it’. ‘At Home with the Templetons continues to build on familiar McInerney themes and is delivered in her usual warm, humorous and moving style,’ she says. Also among the top picks this issue is Peter Yeldham‘s Glory Girl (Michael Joseph, October), according to our reviewer Kate Summers: ‘There was not a thing about Glory Girl that I did not enjoy.’

Comedian Anh Do has penned a memoir, The Happiest Refugee (A&U, September); it got a glowing review from B Owen Baxter, who said ‘when you think you’re about to die from laughing, Do wrenches your heartstrings so hard that within an instant you’re on the brink of crying’. Chris Harrington enjoyed Speaking Volumes: Conversations with Remarkable Writers (Ramona Koval, Scribe, September), saying that ‘Koval’s probing yet sympathetic questions elicit illuminating responses from her subjects’, while Sharon Athanasos enjoyed both Solo (Vicki McAuley, Macmillan, September)—’an inspiring read’—and the inaugural winner of the Finch Memoir Prize Marzipan and Magnolias (Elizabeth Lancaster, Finch Publishing, September): ‘a touching memoir of  Lancaster’s life, leading us across the seas as she connects with “all things Irish” to a battle with Multiple Sclerosis’.

The Philanthropist (John Tesarsch, Sleepers, November) got the thumbs up from Paul Landymore, Candice Cappe liked Outback Spirit (Sue Williams, Michael Joseph, September), Rebecca Butterworth enjoyed Dreaming of Chanel (Charlotte Smith, illus by Grant Cowan, HarperCollins, November) and A Food Lover’s Pilgrimage to Santiago De Compostela (Dee Nolan, Lantern, November) met with the approval of Annelise Balsamo.

We’ve got some reviews for poetry lovers too this issue, with Andrew Wilkins enjoying both Sand (Robert Drewe & John Kinsella, Fremantle Press, November) and Starlight: 150 Poems (John Tranter, UQP, September).

And then there are our Junior Bookseller+Publisher reviews…

Subscribers, we hope you are enjoying the issue. The rest of you can track down a copy at one of the wonderful bookshops listed on our subscriptions page here. Or for a heads up on future issues of the magazine, sign up for our free fortnightly newsletter.

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All liquored up …


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Posted: 6 July 2010 at 1:42 pm

No, not us, our cover. The new issue (August) has landed and the cover is a celebration of, well, ouzo, but also Food from Many Greek Kitchens, the new book coming from the one and only Tessa Kiros in October (Murdoch Books).

The new mag has plenty else to recommend it: news, author Q+As with Kimberley Freeman, L A Larkin and Charlie Pickering, a round-up of Father’s Day titles to look out for come September and, of course, all our reviews.

This time around the titles reviewed include some November releases, among them Preincarnate by Shaun Micallef (Hardie Grant), which reviewer Dani Soloman has awarded five stars. ‘This book sees Shaun Micallef swing a sledgehammer through the fourth wall of literature in order to take his readers on an impossible journey through time,’ writes Soloman. ‘Micallef has managed to transfer his irreverent sense of humour onto the page beautifully, producing a book that is as interesting, clever, funny, distinguished and as good-looking as the Silver Fox himself.’

Also among our reviewers top picks this time around were Bereft by Chris Womersley (Scribe, September), which, Angela Meyer writes, is ‘a rich, gripping tale of love, loss, conflict and salvation’ (‘I had that very rare experience of wanting to read it again, almost immediately,’ she says); YA novel The Innocents by Nette Hilton (Woolshed Press, August), which Jan Bull says ‘has the suspense of Michael Grant’s Gone and the rites of passage elements of Wendy Mass’ The Mango-Shaped Space‘; Singing Saltwater Country: Journey to the Songlines of Carpentaria (John Bradley & Yanyuwa Families, A&U, August), which Clive Tilsley says is ‘an engrossing book’ that should be read by ‘anyone with even the smallest interest in Australia’; and Like Being a Wife (Catherine Harris, Vintage, September), a collection of short stories that Rachel Wilson says ‘firmly lives up to’ some high expectations.

In children’s titles, Chris Morphew’s third book in ‘The Phoenix Files’ series, Mutation (Hardie Grant Egmont, August), got an emphatic thumbs up from reviewer Meredith Tate and Kumiko and the Dragon’s Secret (Briony Stewart, UQP, August) charmed Robin Morrow.

These are only a handful of the more than 40 titles reviewed in the issue, check out the magazine itself for more. (Subscribers, look out for your copy, non-subscribers, here’s a list of places good enough to stock the mag, as well as details on how to subscribe.)

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Dinner and deadlines: the 2010 Miles Franklin award ceremony


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Posted: 24 June 2010 at 11:54 am

This week I was lucky enough to attend my first Miles Franklin Award ceremony, and it was rather exciting. Apparently it hasn’t always been so.

I was surprised to read that last year none of the shortlisted authors turned up for this gala event, but then last year, as in previous years, the winner had already been informed (Tim Winton appeared by video-link) and the media had been sent an embargoed press release, so the announcement understandably lacked a little spark. This year there was none of that, and so gathered in Sydney’s Mitchell Library were five of the six nervous nominees (and they certainly looked nervous) and a handful of on-deadline journalists.

The organisers had promised to make the announcement by 8pm in order for the media to make their evening deadline (8.30m for many!), so we were on a tight schedule—not a bad thing for an awards ceremony. This meant that the winner was announced just as main course was being served, and Peter Temple gave his hilarious acceptance speech over the sound of clinking cutlery (I think the sound of audience laughter drowned most of it out).

Undoubtedly the biggest buzz of the night was around the nominee—and winner—Peter Temple. This is the first time that a crime novel has even been shortlisted for the Miles Franklin Award, and the win is already creating lots of great discussion about the status of genre fiction, and the difference between ‘popular’ and ‘literary’ novels.

Truth is a wonderful book and a challenging one. As Text publisher Michael Heyward said after the win, ‘It’s changed the possibility of the crime novel.’ ‘Truth is a crime novel but also a novel about crime. It’s a contemporary tragedy.’

Someone on my table suggested the only thing Truth had in common with the conventional crime novel was that it opened with a dead body. What I loved about the story was that you had no idea where it was heading, that it had the ability to surprise and puzzle, as well as, like any gripping crime novel, keep you up all night until it was finished.

Temple has a talent for dialogue, as anyone who’s read his novels will appreciate. He’s also known for being an abrupt, even surly, interviewee. So it was interesting to see how he would react to the media scrum that followed the announcement. He seemed genuinely surprised, and a little stunned under the bright lights and TV cameras, but his instinct for great lines didn’t leave him. My favourite comments of the night were:  ‘It’s unusual for a crime writer to receive such a prestigious award, so cop it sweet’ (he told AAP). And his message for booksellers: ‘hand-sell this book until your hands bleed’.

Andrea Hanke is editor of Bookseller+Publisher magazine.

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Fancy Goods Questionnaire: Tim Coronel


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Posted: 18 June 2010 at 3:22 pm

Bookseller+Publisher magazine publisher Tim Coronel has an encyclopaedic knowledge of the Australian book industry, a 1969 Daimler and a thing for watches (no, really). He also has a lot of books. He kindly agreed to tell us about some of them:

What are you reading right now?

I always read multiple books at once: the challenge is finishing them! Right now, depending on the time and place, you might find me dipping into Reality Hunger by David Shields, The Radzestky March by Joseph Roth, Cooper Cars by Doug Nye, The Ask by Sam Lipsyte …

What book do you always recommend?

Geek Love by Katherine Dunn. If you haven’t read it, you should. I’m not going to say anything more than that.

What book are you most looking forward to?

I haven’t yet had a chance to read the new David Mitchell, The Thousand Autumns Of Jacob De Zoet; and I might have to read Justin Cronin’s The Passage to see if it lives up to all the hype.

What book made you wonder what all the fuss was about?

I’m not going the revisit the one a few years back that I gave a really scathing two-star review to and it went on to win the Miles Franklin … I admit I never got very far with Life of Pi; and I seem to be the only person in the world who really (really!) disliked The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo.

What’s the best book you’ve read that no-one’s ever heard of?

Lipstick Traces: A Secret History of the Twentieth Century by Greil Marcus. After finding it literally by accident (I plucked it out of the returns pile at the suburban Canberra bookshop I was working at in 1989), it was truly mind-expanding and life-changing for me. It’s a book that’s ostensibly about music, and particularly about how punk draws on a number of earlier avant-garde movements, but it’s also the book that introduced me to Guy Debord and the Situationists, and which really shaped the way I think about culture, politics, art, music and all that stuff.

Obligatory desert island question—which book would you want with you?

If it was the only book available, maybe I’d finally get around to finishing all the snippets of Walter Benjamin’s Arcades Project. For some strange reason, my ‘comfort book’ has been The Andy Warhol Diaries, I couldn’t count how many times I’ve pulled it off the shelf and re-read parts of it over the past 20 years.

Is there a book you’ve bought for the cover?

Loads! Most recently, Wristwatches: History Of A Century’s Development by Helmut Kahlert et al (Schiffer). I saw an old copy in the window of a second-hand bookshop and almost bought it for an extortionate price, but then found out a revised and updated edition was still in print and bought that (for a slightly less extortionate price).

Hardback, paperback or digital?

e) all of the above. It’s the words that are important, not the container they’re in. Although having said that, I’m finding I’m reading quite a lot on my iPhone.

If I were a literary character I’d be…

Hmmm, that’s a tough one, can I be an amalgam of many characters? A bit Charles Ryder (from Brideshead Revisited), a bit Bernardo Soares (from Pessoa’s Book of Disquiet), a bit Troppmann (from Bataille’s Blue of Noon), a bit Tom Ripley (from Patricia Highsmith’s novels), a bit Bernie Gunther (from Philip Kerr’s Berlin novels), with some Sal Paradise (Kerouac’s alter-ego in On the Road) and James Bond fantasies thrown in for good measure …

The best thing about books is…

They help you avoid eye-contact with strangers on public transport.

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The new issue has landed!


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Posted: 8 June 2010 at 2:48 pm

Well, the shiny new issue of Bookseller+Publisher has landed, with a big fat 20 on the cover—that’d be Allen & Unwin, who are celebrating 20 years of independent publishing this year. Happy Birthday A&U!

The July issue is full of news, profiles, author interviews and of course, reviews. There are several titles that earned five stars this time around, including The Good Daughter (Honey Brown, Viking, July), which Kate Summers at Riverbend Books says ‘carries the same dark, atmospheric weight of Sonya Harnett’s books, with an authenticity that will resonate with teenage, as well as adult readers’; Jon Bauer’s Rocks in the Belly (Scribe, August)—anybody who reads this book and isn’t instantly a fan probably wasn’t paying close enough attention’, says B Owen Baxter—and Kindling (Darren Groth, Hachette, July), which Toni Whitmont of online bookshop Booktopia says ‘is an absolute stunner’, with ‘shades of Mark Haddon’s The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time‘, and ‘in parts, of Scot Gardner’s Burning Eddy‘.

Tony Wilson’s Making News (Pier 9, July) impressed Riverbend Bookshop’s Lee McGowan, who calls the novel ‘a scathing commentary on tabloid journalism’s gorge on the greasy spoon of contemporary celebrity’—’a fast-paced, near-realist melodrama sliced through with box-cutter blade humour’. (more…)

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Fancy Goods questionnaire: Andrew Wrathall


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Posted: 4 June 2010 at 4:52 pm

Publishing assistant at Bookseller+Publisher Andrew Wrathall resisted telling us about the books he loves for some time, but we squeezed it out of him and this is what he said.

What are you reading right now?

Well… the list includes: Salamander (Thomas Wharton, Flamingo) a story about a mad count, an 18th-century printer and a strange clockwork castle in Europe; Fringe Dwellers (Nene Gare, Sun Books) a story about Indigenous and non-Indigenous Australians a century ago; the classic novel Empire of the Sun (J G Ballard, HarperPerennial) about a boy in Shanghai when war strikes; Clive Hamilton’s latest book Requiem for a Species (A&U) about climate change; and an old memoir of a bookshop, Hill of Content (A H Spencer, A&R).

What book do you always recommend?

I’ll always recommend The Beach (Alex Garland, Penguin) because I love Garland’s imagination in creating the jaded backpacker Richard and the utopian travellers’ hideaway. And of course young adults (and old adults alike) must visit Pullman’s world of The Northern Lights (Phillip Pullman, Scholastic).

What book are you most looking forward to?

I want to read Dead in the Family (Charlaine Harris, Hachette), which has been sitting on my desk staring at me for quite a while, but I still haven’t read the nineth Sookie Stackhouse book, so I have to read that one first. Yep, I’m a fan of the television series True Blood too.

(more…)

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Excuse us while we take a moment…


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Posted: 20 May 2010 at 5:42 pm

We’re pretty snowed under here at Bookseller+Publisher headquarters, putting the finishing touches on the July issue after getting out this week’s bumper issue of the Weekly Book Newsletter.

Last week, Matthia was sweating it out at Darwin’s Wordstorm writers festival (you can read her post on Wordstorm here) and this week Andrea is soaking up Sydney Writers Festival (and heading to tonight’s Book Design Awards to see what titles are declared Australia’s best-looking: see the contenders here). This is what Andrea’s desk looks like now:

Also, as we reported in the Weekly Book Newsletter, REDgroup Retail, which owns Borders Asia-Pacific (and Angus & Robertson and Whitcoulls in New Zealand), launched its Kobo ebook platform yesterday, as well as its Kobo ereader: (more…)

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Wordstorm 2010: the festival of Australasian writing


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Posted: 18 May 2010 at 3:38 pm

The weather at this year’s Wordstorm writers festival (held 13 to 16 May in Darwin—officially in the ‘dry’ third of the year), was humid enough for even the locals to admit things were ‘warm’. But for those who sweated and fanned their way through sessions in the lush (unairconditioned) Darwin Botantic Gardens, there was the reward of hearing voices that don’t always carry as far south as Victoria and New South Wales—or get as much airtime when they do.

Of course some big-name guests sold out special event sessions at other venues—Wendy Harmer, Tim Flannery and Germaine Greer among them—but the shelves in the Dymocks bookshop tent in the gardens were packed with titles by authors less familiar to my non-Territorian eye, books by writers from Timor, Indonesia, Singapore and Malaysia—a mix which justifies Wordstorm’s recent rebranding as the ‘festival of Australasian writing’.

Ha’u Maka Lucas/I Am Lucas, which won first prize in the Timorese National Short Novel Writing Competition, for example, was stocked by the bookshop in its original Timorese edition, its author Teodosio Babtista Ximenes hoping to find Australian support for an English translation of his story, which is based on the removal of Timorese children from their families by the Indonesian army in the late 1970s. Nearby was the anthology of Indonesian work in translation, Reasons for Harmony, published by the Ubud Writers and Readers Festival.

The bookshop shelves were also full with poetry, fiction, nonfiction, plays and anthologies by Aboriginal authors from around the country, including Marie Munkara, Yvette Holt, Wesley Enoch, Lionel Fogarty, Lorraine McGee-Sippel, Philip McLaren, Marcia Langton, Melissa Lucashenko and Margaret Kemarre (M K) Turner—several of whom appeared at the Indigenous Writers and Educators conference which ran as part of the festival on 12 and 13 May at Charles Darwin University.

From this overwhelming mix, I came away with Ali Cobby Eckermann’s book of poetry little bit long time (Picaro Press), a collection that’s direct, personal, moving and beautiful; the anthology Fishtails in the Dust: Writing from the Centre (Ptilotus Press), which includes some of the poems from Eckermann’s collection among short stories and other works by a range of Central Australian writers; Terra, a bilingual English/Indonesian anthology of work by writers who have appeared at Wordstorm between 2004 and 2006, edited by festival director Sandra Thibodeaux; and M K Turner’s Iwenhe Tyerrtye: What It Means to Be an Aboriginal Person (IAD Press), which was launched at the festival. Opera soprano Deborah Cheetham read from a section of Turner’s book in a panel on ‘Home, Land, Homeland’, emphasising the importance of words to human identity: ‘Words makes things happen. Words makes us alive… That’s how I got taught these things, how I’ve learned through out my life, how I’ve always seen the world, how I understand it, and how and what in all those ways life has always been.’ (more…)

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