CATEGORIES

Ever since Melina Marchetta wowed young adults with her book Looking for Alibrandi, she’s been a favourite author among teenagers. Her new book The Piper’s Son has just hit bookshelves and was popular in our Most Mentioned chart this weekend. Tom Rachman’s The Imperfectionists and Chris Hammer’s The River also garnered a few mentions. But it was Don DeLillo’s Point Omega and Mary-Ellen Mullane’s Once on a Road that nabbed the most mentions and are the highest achievers of the week–Media Extra.

Most mentioned in the Media this week

1 Once on a Road, by Mary-Ellen Mullane
2 Point Omega, by Don DeLillo
3 Imperfectionists, The by Tom Rachman
4 Piper’s Son, The by Melina Marchetta
5 Rupture, by Simon Lelic

Source: http://www.booksellerandpublisher.com.au/articles/2010/03/15089/

This article from Thorpe Bowker’s Weekly Book Newsletter and Media Extra is reproduced by kind permission of Thorpe-Bowker, a division of R R Bowker LLC. © Copyright 2009, Thorpe-Bowker.

We couldn’t make it to the Adelaide Writers Week 2010, but lucky for us, long-time Boomerang Books customer Amanda McInerney was a constant presence at the festival, and we were lucky enough to have her blog for us.

For those that missed her posts, here’s a recap:

Day One • Day Two • Day Three • Day Five

Amanda McInerney is passionate about books and reading.  She has recently started her own foodie blog at http://lambsearsandhoney.com/.

Reviewed by Ann Skea (ann@skea.com)

“A modern Love-story” says the blurb. But this book is more than that, and no brief description captures the freshness, the humour, and the sheer energy and variety with which Helen Simonson has shaped it.  As well as a wonderfully dramatic adventure and an hilarious and disastrous village ball, she has woven in plenty of things to think about. The conflicts created for her characters by the casual bigotry, class-discrimination and racism of ordinary and very nice people; the struggle to reconcile old traditions with modern materialism; a glimpse of family conflicts and the misunderstanding arising from the generation gap; and the common dreams of companionship and freedom which all of us share, no matter how old we are: all these are part of the mix. Simonson’s greatest achievement, however, is to make her main characters wonderfully fallible, complex, sensitive, stubborn, sharp and intelligent human beings, so that we feel for them and with them, and rejoice when they behave like a mythical hero and heroine and follow their impossible dream, to the outrage of their families and the censure and disapproval of society in general.

From the moment that sixty-eight-year-old Major Ernest Pettigrew (retired)  answers the doorbell wearing a clematis-patterned housecoat, it is clear that he is not your usual romantic hero. Nor is Mrs Jasmina Ali, the Muslim owner of the village Supersaver Supermart (the name says much about recent changes in village England), your run-of-the mill heroine. Both are strong, outspoken, independent characters with a wry sense-of-humour and a sometimes caustic wit, and both have lost a loved spouse in recent years and have adapted to a solitary life. Neither is looking for romance but a friendship with someone who shares their love of literature would certainly be acceptable.

Major Pettigrew (he is almost always ‘Major’, just as Jasmina is almost always ‘Mrs Ali’) has decided views on “honour, duty, decorum and a properly brewed cup of tea”. The society in which he lives is a conventional English village society, almost a caricature of such a place, and his position in it is established and taken-for-granted. Mrs Ali, is a fifty-six-year-old,  English born, Urdu-speaking widow, whose Indian relatives are starting to exert pressure on her to behave as a traditional Indian widow should, allow the men to take charge,  and retire into the family to look after an elderly relative. Circumstancs bring them together and friendship blossoms. But circumstances, relatives and the expectations of others also part them. The course of true love never did run smooth, as they say, but modern society seems able to throws more twists and turns into the course than might be expected and Simonson exploits a surprising range of them.

There are many different character is this book and some, especially the Americans in the story, are very close to caricature, but generally, all the characters are given a human side which saves them from being shallow stereotypes. Simonson is good, too, as suggesting underlying tensions without spelling them out. Altogether, she handles the story with great skill and although  she does not tell us the final outcome of the adventurous romance she allows us to dream on, happily convinced that love may, indeed, conquer all.

The advertising material sent to reviewers of this book suggests that if readers enjoyed The Guernsey Literary and Potato Pie Society, which was published by the same publishers who are handling Major Pettigrew’s Last Stand, then they will enjoy this book. They are very different books, but both treat the reader as intelligent, both deal with more than romance, and both are fresh and interesting first novels.

Copyright © Ann Skea 2010
Website and Ted Hughes pages: http://ann.skea.com/

The Thirteenth Tale by Diane Setterfield
Reviewed by TeresaS

Margaret Lea lives for books. When she is offered the challenge of writing the biography of the most famous writer in England, she finds uncanny parallels with her own life.

The Thirteenth Tale is a book for greedy bibliophiles. It’s a book for all those of us who know books as places to lose oneself, books as vehicles for travel in time and space, who feel sentimental about books as objects. Albeit if that sentimentality sometimes tips over into indulgent soppiness. Who cares?  This is a sometimes silly, entertaining, enchanting and engrossing story, with all the ingredients of a gothic novel. Set on the Yorkshire Moors, with massive old houses falling into decay, abandoned babies, topiary gardens, and undiscovered ancestry, it lays out a mystery which twists and turns through ghostly imaginings and haunted characters.

The thrill of this book is its challenge to the site of truth. What tells us more about the past, subjective unreliable narrative or factual evidence?

This is Dianne Setterfield’s first novel, though she is very well versed in 19th and 20th century French literature. All the way through this book, you get the feeling that she is having a great deal of fun playing with genre and image and language to produce a lovely bibliomystery.

The Thirteenth Tale could be criticised for its shameless evocation of the Brontes and Dickens, but that would be churlish. It’s not highbrow. It has a certain whiff of upstairs-downstairs. But as a whole, it’s a book to read in one gulp, curled up in an armchair, beside a pile of unread tomes!

A big thanks to the nearly 50 members who submitted reviews – keep entering for your chance to win! For being this month’s winner, TeresaS has won $50 to spend in Boomerang Bucks.

Wow – look at this demo of digitised books on the iPad… I think I just got sold on the concept (well… on all books except novels). [via Gizmondo].

I started The Slightly Skewed Life of Toby Chrysler about three years ago. However, about that time I thought I’d like to start publishing other authors’ books so I had two careers happening at once. The trouble is, I’d created a monster with Ford Street Publishing. Although publishing seven to eight books a year doesn’t sound too hectic, it’s easy to forget the major publishers have staff to edit, do accounts, market/publicity, proofread, design, liaise with authors and illustrators, write contracts, etc, etc. With a small press, it’s usually just one person that does all that.

Moi in other words.

So I wrote Toby in dribs and drabs whenever I had a chance. I knew I wanted a character, Fluke, to have a certain character trait. That is to say, words in sentences that change the meaning of the sentence.

I didn’t know what a malapropism was until I started researching for Fluke’s character. They’re sentences that have a substitution of a word that doesn’t really make sense but have a comic effect. So a “decaffeinated coffee” becomes a “decapitated coffee”; “for all intent and purposes” becomes “for all intensive purposes”; “charity begins at home” becomes “clarity begins at home”. The trick is to make sure the verbal gaffes all relate to the actual story. Some of my favourite malapropisms are: “the town was flooded and everyone had to be evaporated”; “dysentery in the ranks”; and of course, “Kath and Kim’s friends who are very effluent”.

The characters’ names come from anecdotal stories. Toby is nicknamed Milo, because he’s not Quik. Fluke was named after his mother tried conceiving on the IVF program, gave up, then conceived. Hence, Fluke.

Once I’d finished The Slightly Skewed Life of Toby Chrysler I wondered which publisher I could send it to. After all, most know me as a science fiction writer – I don’t know why this is because I’ve written many more fantasy novels than science fiction novels, but there you are! So taking a leaf from Doris Lessing’s book (she also sent two manuscripts to publishers under a pseudonym), I sent the manuscript to all the major publishers under another name. Like Doris Lessing, it was rejected. One publisher did say I could send more of my work because I “showed promise”. But one editor loved it and recommended another publisher because his company was being subsumed by another publisher. So I took up his suggestion and waited . . . and waited. And despite having a great recommendation from this eminent editor, my manuscript waited in a slush pile for four months. I enquired about it, but received no reply. I waited another month before withdrawing the manuscript. The editor then said it was nearing the top of the pile to be read. Now this is a very subjective statement. The slush pile could be a mile high, and three quarters way near the top is months away from being read, but is still “nearing the top”, right?

I withdrew the story. I was then faced with a dire predicament. Where could I send my new book? I was judging a writing competition called the Charlotte Duncan Award at the time. Celapene Press was the publisher. So under the pseudonym I sent Toby to Kathryn Duncan, the publisher at Celapene. It was accepted within the week and within four months it was published. So, there you – this reads more like the slightly skewed life of the author, hey?!

Paul Collins

Self-proclaimed geek and first-time novelist Foz Meadows speaks to Kate O’Donnell about Solace and Grief, her young adult urban fantasy.

Solace and Grief, in spite of its gothic appearance and dramatic plot, is also a very funny story with witty characters. Was it hard to find a balance of light and dark?
Yes, at times. Whenever I’m writing a tense or emotional scene, it feels like there are three different writers in me vying for control-a dramatist longing for tragedy, a closet romantic, and a comedian who looks for the humour in everything. And I do mean that literally. When I was 13 or so, I took it into my head to give names, faces and distinct character attributes to three different parts of my personality, and 10 years later, it’s still hard to resist thinking of myself in those terms, especially when writing. In that sense, then, the balance of the story is a bit like the balance of my personality-skewed. I have to fight with myself on multiple fronts. At the same time, humour often creeps in unannounced, but in ways which, once I notice, feel completely natural. I’ve always had a healthy appreciation for irony and the absurd-the original Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy radio series is one of my favourite things in the entire universe-because life is so rarely a straight-up choice between laughter and seriousness. More often, the two are blended together; poignancy is a mix of different emotions, not an absolute state. Reality seldom misses an opportunity to tromp all over the drama of human existence with the Gumboots of Inopportune Timing, so why should fantasy be any different?

There are a lot of other vampire and supernatural stories out at the moment, were you conscious of that and did it change any of your plans?
I’m more conscious of it now that the book is about to come out, but at the time I started writing, which was back in 2007, I was quite oblivious. My then day-job involved a certain amount of downtime in front of a computer, and after a marathon rewatching of my favourite Buffy the Vampire Slayer episodes, the opening scene of Solace suddenly popped into my head. It wasn’t until I was more than halfway through and plotting the subsequent volumes that I noticed how popular urban fantasy in general and vampires in particular were becoming, but two years is a long time, and the genre has expanded enormously since then. I didn’t change anything because of that popularity, but I did avoid reading vampire stories until after the first draft was finished-just to keep my head clear.

On your blog you have written about the recent increase of proudly feminine fantasy books, usually a male-dominated area. Solace is a great female character– do you think this genre is any closer to achieving gender parity?
I think that depends on where in the genre you turn your focus, and from what angle. Certainly, when it comes to strong female authors and characters, fantasy has a wealth of both on offer, and has done for some time. Growing up, almost all my favourite fantasy authors were, and are, women. What’s new in this instance-or if not new, then certainly booming-is the extent to which a certain kind of fantasy story is being written with women as the intended audience, rather than for a mixed or primarily masculine market. Paranormal romance is the obvious example, and I think there’s an argument to be made that, as a predominantly feminine subgenre, it acts as a counterbalance to hard science-fiction, which has often been described as a more masculine arena. Beyond that, however, I think that fantasy as a whole is definitely an equal opportunities employer, and if any imbalance does remain, it’s not for lack of talented authors striving to address it.

What are you working on next?
I finished the first draft of the next Solace novel a month or so ago, which means it’s just about ripe for some serious editing. I haven’t begun the third volume yet, but I’ve got a folder of notes on how it all plays out, and I’m quite excited to put it into practice. In the interim, however, I’ve been ambushed by a new adult fantasy novel; it’s something of a murder mystery set in a semi-futuristic city of magic and strange technology. I’m a bit over halfway through the first instalment, and though I’m not planning a serial narrative arc, I’ve outlined some future stories featuring the same protagonists. There are also a few short pieces I’d like to get down, assuming I find the time!

This review from Australian Bookseller & Publisher magazine (March 2010, Vol 89, No. 6) is reproduced by kind permission of Thorpe-Bowker, a division of R R Bowker LLC. © Copyright 2009, Thorpe-Bowker.

Award-winning author Melina Marchetta, talks to Lee McGowan about her new novel, The Piper’s Son.

More than your previous works, The Piper’s Son seems to be aimed at an older audience. What made you return to Saving Francesca? How did you decide on when in their lives you wanted to shine a light on the characters?
I don’t get caught up in audience when I write a novel. The Piper’s Son isn’t really aimed at anyone different except this time the characters are older. Although not intentional, it seemed the perfect segue that Saving Francesca came out in 2003 when the characters were turning 17 and that I began writing the sequel five years later when they were five years older. I always say that I didn’t choose Tom Mackee but that he chose me. I resisted him for a while because I didn’t think he was big enough to carry a novel, not after Taylor from Jellicoe and Finnikin from Lumatere. What made this novel difficult was that it wasn’t plot driven. Most of the action happens before the novel begins. But it just made sense that I pick up this story at another decision-making time in someone’s life when they finish their university degrees and feel too old to be still living at home and feel too young to be out in the world on their own. I like transitional ages. I did the same with Tom’s aunt, Georgie. She’s my age and I wanted to show how relationships are just as important and difficult. That people still have a pulse after 40. That you’re stuffing up at any age and loving with a great passion at any age.

The morass of family life is captured so beautifully in The Piper’s Son. What is it that draws you to write about such love and loss and the consequent distresses and triumphs in relationships?
I suppose it’s because I found that many things got easier in life. Writing got easier. Teaching got easier. Keeping my house tidy even got easier. But family life and relationships didn’t. I’ve become more aware of how fragile everything is and how there are bigger repercussions if you stuff up and how much harder you have to work at staying together. I hate it when people think I have strong family relationships because I come from an Italian family and that it’s a given. It’s not that way at all. We are constantly working at it. The strength and fragility of community life was what I wanted to convey with the Finch Mackees. Those people were crazy mad for each other but they let each other down constantly and still managed to find some hope.

There are so many great, serious, humanly flawed characters, in The Piper’s Son. Do you find juggling a large cast difficult? Did the story ever look like it might not be Tom Mackee’s?
I work well with a cast of thousands. It’s why I find short stories and shorter books so difficult to write. What happens is that I introduce one character to another and they interact with friends, lovers, enemies and so on. I become very interested in everyone’s story. But I need to know from the beginning whose story it belongs to and I always knew this was going to be about the piper’s son, Tom. But I couldn’t tell Tom’s story without writing about his father and I couldn’t write about his father, Dominic, without including Tom’s mother and his aunt Georgie and his beloved Uncle Joe and of course I couldn’t leave out the gang from Saving Francesca. So I used them all to complement Tom’s story.

Joe’s death in London and Tom Finch’s death in Vietnam don’t happen in the book, but are central to the lives of Tom Mackee and his family. How did you research these events?
The writing of this novel began one night while I was watching an Australian Story episode about Jim Bourke and the vets who returned to Vietnam to bring home the six servicemen left behind during the war. I read all the transcripts of the program and found out that Jim Bourke came from the same place in North Queensland as my mum, the Burdekin, and that he spoke of not attending his father’s funeral so never quite believed his father had died. I knew my story was going to be about not being able to bury your dead and the impact that has on a family when it happens twice in their lifetime. I contacted Jim Bourke, flew to Melbourne and interviewed him and he was so generous and emotional and funny and irreverent and you could tell he loved those men left behind, despite not having met them. At one stage he asked me if I wanted contact with any of the families and I said no. I write fiction. It will never come close to the pain real people are experiencing when they lose a loved one. The most difficult part was deciding that Joe died in the 2005 London bombings, but I didn’t want this story to be about terrorism. So I stuck to the basics, such as the route it took and where Joe would have got on the train. I read transcript after transcript of what happened after the bombings with the families. I read almost every obituary. It was the saddest research I’ve ever had to do in my life, but the only thing I used of that was when Georgie speaks about travelling to London with her estranged partner, Sam, and how Sam went from hospital to hospital putting up posters of Joe’s photograph. The interesting thing about research is you can fill a notebook, but sometimes only a line or two ends up in your novel. But you had to fill that notebook to understand the context.

Do you have plans to revisit any of your other novels?
I’m writing the sequel to Finnikin of the Rock about one of the characters named Froi, picking up the story three years later.

This review from Australian Bookseller & Publisher magazine (March 2010, Vol 89, No. 6) is reproduced by kind permission of Thorpe-Bowker, a division of R R Bowker LLC. © Copyright 2009, Thorpe-Bowker.

Andrew Humphreys tends to write about ‘identity, loneliness, memory, obligation, understanding and redemption’ and talking horses. He tells Laurie Steed about his new novel.

Martin Westley Takes a Walk is surprisingly funny, given its serious topic of personal responsibility. Was that your intention from the start? How did the novel develop during the writing process?
Yes, I always hoped the novel would be as funny as it was serious. The usual assumption, I guess, is that a novel (or a film, or even a piece of music) is either serious or funny, and if it’s funny, then it’s somehow less valuable. But there’s no reason a writer can’t do both things equally well. All my favourite writers–everybody from William Thackeray to William Gaddis, Evelyn Waugh to Thomas Pynchon–are funny, and none of their work is frivolous or lacking in literary ambition. I started writing the book about six months after my twin sons were born, so the novel developed slowly. The writing process was fairly fragmented–I’d write whenever I got a chance to sit still–but by the time I’d finished the first draft, most of my original ideas had made it through. The one thing that really changed was the role of Martin’s family. Somewhere along the way I realised just how important they were to telling Martin’s story. Funnily enough, it also takes Martin more time than it should to realise how important they are to him.

The main character, Martin, is hit in the head by a kite in the opening pages of the novel. In later pages, he has his foot run over and is beaten up. How important is personal tragedy in shaping good comedic situations for your characters?

Poor old Martin is always the fall guy. I guess it’s because he’s rarely fully aware of a situation or his surroundings. If a kite is going to knock someone cold, that someone is always going to be Martin Westley. Still, it usually ends up doing him some good. It’s true that comedy is often (maybe even always) someone else’s pain. And physical pain is the best kind of pain to work with. It’s direct and it’s universal. When it happens to Martin, it ultimately makes him more self-aware. It also makes it easier for us to empathise with him.

The story is set in and around Sydney, from Circular Quay to its eastern beaches. What about Sydney captivates you as a writer?
I’ve lived nearly all my life in Sydney so I know the city well. And it’s important to me that my books have a real sense of time and place, which makes setting a book in contemporary Sydney an easy choice. I also love the way that writers like Nelson Algren are intimately connected with their cities. Algren will always be known as a ‘Chicago’ writer. I’d like to be known as a ‘Sydney’ writer. I always thought my first book, The Weight of the Sun, was something of a love letter to Sydney. Wonderful was a bit of a detour (through Hungary, Africa and Hollywood between the wars), but Martin Westley continues the affair. At the same time, I want all my books to be universal, so that the place is not essential to the story. I’d like to think Martin Westley and his family could live anywhere. It was just lucky for me that they settled in Sydney.

Each novel you have written, from The Weight of the Sun, through to Wonderful, and now Martin Westley Takes a Walk, is different in both tone and subject matter from your other works. What are you working on next?
I’ve always thought it very unfair that painters are allowed to paint the same bowl of fruit over and over until they get it right, but writers are expected to come up with new sets of characters and situations from book to book. The way we get around it is by writing about the same things in different ways-it’s all an elaborate disguise. Changing the subject matter and tone is one way of doing it. Tone, to me, is especially important, and I wanted the tone of Martin Westley to be very clear and direct, right from the very first sentence. But even though the people change, I’m still writing about the same things: identity, loneliness, memory, obligation, understanding and redemption. And talking horses. There’s always a talking horse. Right now I’m working on an original film script. It’s about a widower who takes a prostitute fishing and it’s called The River and the Sea. It’s also set in Sydney.

This review from Australian Bookseller & Publisher magazine (March 2010, Vol 89, No. 6) is reproduced by kind permission of Thorpe-Bowker, a division of R R Bowker LLC. © Copyright 2009, Thorpe-Bowker.

Stefen Brazulaitis, expert on all things fantasy, sci-fi and the like, quizzes author Will Elliot on his new fantasy novel, The Pilgrims.

The Pilgrims will be presented as fantasy–your first fiction release Pilo Family Circus was marketed as a horror title. What are your thoughts on the sub-classification of speculative fiction into genres?
I don’t get worked up about it. I don’t know any horror readers who don’t appreciate a good fantasy, or vice versa. By some definitions, Pilo was dark fantasy rather than horror (I regard it as horror). The Pilgrims is a quite different animal to Pilo, more an orthodox fantasy, but still quite a dark production. I doubt horror purists will consider me an apostate after some of the scenes they’ll find The Pilgrims.

The Pilgrims features people from our world stepping into a parallel reality. Often readers will see metaphors for our world in this reality. What analogies do you think readers may draw between the world of Levaal and our own?
A lot of Levaal’s dynamics are revealed in more detail in the second book. But as a road can be a metaphor for several things, so too can be the Wall at World’s End, the castle and its denizens, the imprisonment of the great dragons, so on. It’s the same way a physical description of something will seldom be totally identical in each reader’s mind’s eye. Slipping into another reality to some could mean coming of age, the culture shock of moving to another country, experiencing war, dying and life after death, undergoing some other permanent change. Or of course a psychotic experience. Each to their own reading …

There is much of the grotesque in The Pilgrims, particularly the twisted bodies of the Mages and the implacable otherness of the Tormentors. Do you think your work as a horror writer leads you to approach fantasy in a different way?
I don’t consciously choose a genre’s devices because they fit in the genre. Sometimes the emotional notes needing to be struck are horror or revulsion or shock, so I try to hit them as hard as I can. Reading horror helps show how that can be done, the same way reading mysteries can help show how to pace big revelations. I really wanted to incorporate what I like best about two writers usually held to be polar opposites in fantasy, Tolkien and Mervyn Peake. Peake does ‘grotesque’ brilliantly without even using supernatural devices; Tolkien makes you a kid again with his magic and fairytale wonder. I was hoping to be a kind of bastard lovechild of the two.

In addition to the rest of the ‘Pendulum’ series, are you working on any other projects at the moment?
The ‘Pendulum’ books are taking all my attention at present. Book two is complete but for some polishing, book three needs to be begun soon, so that’s all I’m really worried about. I think there’s room in this setting for further books, even further trilogies, but I’ll see if readers like its direction before embarking. That aside, a short story collection is a possibility, and there are stand-alone novels waiting to be touched up and rewritten.

This review from Australian Bookseller & Publisher magazine (March 2010, Vol 89, No. 6) is reproduced by kind permission of Thorpe-Bowker, a division of R R Bowker LLC. © Copyright 2009, Thorpe-Bowker.