Notes from Eve Abbey • November 2018

Browse: SUMMER READING 2018 CATALOGUE NEW RELEASES

Rick Morton, journalist on The Australian, has written a searing autobiography about his childhood on an enormous pastoral station in far-west Queensland. Not easy reading but leavened by some very amusing insights.

His violent and tyrannical grandfather passed on his genes throughout the family. Morton now says he is a “middle-class man in a poor boy’s body”. If you want to understand what it is like to be poor in this country read this. It is called One Hundred Years of Dirt.

It is 250 years since Captain Cook set sail from England to enter the Pacific. There is a book which is a companion piece to a TV programme on Foxtel I think. It is called The Pacific in the Wake of Captain Cook with Sam Neill and written by Meaghan Wilson Anastasios.

As I was born in New Zealand and went to a country school with many Maori friends I especially enjoyed the first section. I even have a copy of Cook’s famous map of New Zealand. I might put it up in the shop. It is a very readable book with informative remarks from interested people especially displayed throughout the text as well as excellent colour photographs.

There is a new book from Clare Wright who wrote The Forgotten Rebels of Eureka about the women involved in that famous episode. This new, much larger, book is called You Daughters of Freedom: The Australians Who Won The Vote and Inspired the World. Clare points out that World War I overshadowed the fame of Australia as a progressive reformist nation.

This new book is about the well-travelled activists such as Vida Goldstein, Nellie Martel, Dora Montefiore, Muriel Matters and Dora Meeson-Coates (who painted the famed banner carried in the British Suffragettes’ enormous marches in 1908 and 1911). These Australian women were amongst the leaders in the International movement for votes for women.

Both books are very readable. Here is an historian who can tell a good story!

Robyn Williams, of ABC Radio's The Science Show fame, has just written his autobiography and given it the title Turmoil: Letters from the Brink. Like many of us in the later stages of interesting lives he wonders where the world is heading.

Many of his tales fall into line with the recent upheaval at ABC where management by email or cartoon seemed to have gained the upperhand. He enthusiastically sings the praises of young scientists in Australia and thinks he has had a very lucky life.

You will enjoy, as I did, some stories about famous scientists. The Science Show is on Radio National on Saturday at noon and repeated on Wednesday. Don’t miss it. Thank you Robyn and friends.

I hope you pick up a copy of Abbey’s Christmas catalogue for 2018 which is in-store now. Inside the front cover there is a nice photograph of Abbey’s when we were in the Queen Victoria Building in George Street. Do you remember that comfortable shop? I think we have customers today who came along there with their parents. That was fifty years ago!

Keep well,

Since 1968 ~ Abbey's 131 York Street Sydney ~ An Aladdin's cave for readers

Notes from Eve Abbey • October 2018

NEW RELEASES

I’ve been reading some really good novels, not the latest releases, most especially Ruth Park’s The Harp in the South. What a great writer! You can get Harp in the South at a good price as a Popular Penguin, but the typeface is old fashioned or you can choose The Harp In the South Novels which includes Missus, Harp in the South and Poor Man’s Orange. I’m sure if you have been to the Sydney Theatre Company production you will want to fill it all in. Pure enjoyment.

Photo credit: Daniel Boud





I was also given Steven Carroll’s latest version of T.S.Eliot’s private life in A New England Affair. Steven has made two previous imaginings in The Lost Life or in A World of Other People. All wonderful books. This latest one is so very sad it was hard to read.

I admire greatly the writing of Steven Carroll so must remind you again of the Glenroy series about a suburban family in Melbourne beginning in the Fifties. There are five novels now – the first is The Art of the Engine Driver, so check them out at Abbey’s or in your library. Unique style. Great writing.





Finally I have also enjoyed an expanded edition, of Anthony Hill’s Captain Cook’s Apprentice. It is 250 years since Cook’s momentous voyage into the Pacific , so important to us, so it is a good time to publish the expanded edition of this ripping novel. Isaac Manley, one of the servant boys on board was promoted to Midshipman and later became an Admiral so there will be lots to learn for anyone dreaming of a life at sea – both good and bad.

Keep well,

Since 1968 ~ Abbey's 131 York Street Sydney ~ An Aladdin's cave for readers

Notes from Eve Abbey • April 2018

NEW RELEASES

Would you like to try a piece of really original writing? Something unusual? If so, read The Town by Shaun Prescott. This is a first novel from a short story writer and it is very successful. His work is being compared to Gerald Murnane, especially to The Plains. There is a carefully controlled voice of the narrator, a writer who has moved to a Central West country town in order to write a book about the disappearing towns of the outback. The voice is dry and flat like the surrounding countryside. Is it banal? Surely something will happen? Someone will rebel? Fatalistic for sure. The Lifted Brow is the small publisher responsible for this. Take a good look.

I’ve just finished reading Tim Winton’s deeply personal book The Boy Behind the Curtains. This is a wonderful book, brilliantly written, wise and mature. In some pieces he recalls accidents that happened to his family, in others he speaks about the landscape of Western Australia and in others he recalls the important part played by church-going in his adolescence, or a visit to the National Gallery of Victoria or the euphoria of surfing or swimming with whales or the strangeness of a winter living in the gatehouse of a derelict Irish castle.

A fine book to give to a young person just awakening to the world. These autobiographical pieces are to be savoured one at a time.

The Boy Behind the Curtain has recently won the Non-Fiction Prize at the Adelaide Festival. Tim has donated the $15,000 prize to the fund for the Ningaloo Reef, one of his environmental concerns.

Since then I have read Tim Winton’s latest book, a novel called The Shepherd’s Hut. This is a very different approach. Written in the voice of an angry, poorly educated young man who has been horribly abused by his father, it is a style I would usually not enjoy reading but there are intermittent gorgeous descriptions of the Western Australian landscape as the young man escapes from society.

He stumbles across an old man, a priest who has been, for some reason, seemingly imprisoned on the edge of the huge, beautiful salt lake. Gradually, you come to understand that this is an allegory about the painful search for peace.

Winton’s writing is never dull and always has some deeper meaning. The story will stay with you.

Fans of Julian Barnes will enjoy his latest novel The Only Story, which is the curiously unemotional tale of a long love affair between a very young man and an older married woman in the suburban wilds of Surrey, England. All very circumspect and polite. I found it odd and dispiriting but nonetheless thought-provoking.

I’ve been watching a three disc set of Evelyn Waugh’s fabulous novel Brideshead Revisited. So sad. So melancholy. But thirty or more years ago no-one rang a friend on Sunday night because everyone was watching Brideshead Revisited.

The novel was a surprise departure from the famous satirical novels he had written in the thirties and described Charles Ryder’s infatuation with an aristocratic Anglo-Catholic family. It was first published in 1945 but the Popular Penguin edition which you can buy for $12.99 (who can complain about the price of books!) has some revisions made by Waugh and his Preface to the revised edition.

After Brideshead Revisited he went on to write some of best novels of the twentieth century, using his own experience as a not very successful soldier. Officers and Gentlemen, Men at Arms and Unconditional Surrender were put into one volume in 1965 under the title Sword of Honour. There is a special edition in Penguin Modern Classics as well as a Popular Penguin edition.

At Abbey’s you can usually find the backlist titles from special authors so look out for Vile Bodies, Handful of Dust, Scoop and Put Out More Flags, all of which were first published in the thirties. Enjoy yourself.

You can also find Waugh’s Complete Short Stories 1910-1962 as well as Work Suspended and Other Stories. To complete your pleasure look for Evelyn Waugh: A Life Revisited by Philip Eade. And what a life! Not an especially nice man but a wonderful writer with a wicked tongue.

VIEW EVELYN WAUGH • IN STOCK

Keep well,

Eve

Since 1968 ~ Abbey's 131 York Street Sydney ~ An Aladdin's cave for readers

Conversations in Crime Alley: NEWTON & NUNN on APRIL 10

Step aside Dalziel and Pascoe. Take a walk Cagney and Lacey. Newton and Nunn will be taking to the mics.

AUTHOR EVENT: Join Sydney author P M Newton and Swaziland-author-who-calls-Australia-home Malla Nunn for a free-ranging (and FREE) conversation about crime novels, crime authors and crime writing.

P M Newton spent over a decade as a detective in the NSW police force, including time in Sydney's southwest and the Drug Enforcement Agency. Her debut novel The Old School signalled her as being an exciting new home-grown crime writing talent and the follow-up Beams Falling has just arrived into store and went straight into our bestsellers.

Malla Nunn was born in Swaziland, South Africa, and currently lives in Sydney. She is also a filmmaker with three award-winning films to her credit. Her novels include A Beautiful Place to Die, Let the Dead Lie, and Silent Valley.

We would very much like you to join us on the night ~ please RSVP to events@abbeys.com.au

THURSDAY 10 APRIL

6PM

131 YORK STREET, SYDNEY

Buy these books at Abbey's (131 York Street Sydney) ~ An Aladdin's cave for readers

Cairo by Chris Womersley ~ Abbey's Bookseller Pick

ABBEY'S BOOKSELLER PICK ----- When Tom escapes the suffocating dullness of the small Victorian town where he has grown up and moves into the 'Cairo' apartment building in Melbourne's bohemian Fitzroy he feels that at last his real life is beginning.

The streets are alive with promise, the cafes and pubs filled with interesting people. Instead of enrolling at the University he feels his education would be better here, amongst the artists, the free thinkers that inhabit the suburb and indeed his own apartment building.

He has soon met Max and his wife, the desirable and lovely Sally. Alcoholic James too, and the desperate heroin users Greta and Edward in their vast warehouse, painters both.

Life is good, an endless round of drinks, parties, a little work washing up in a cafe. But then Tom gets involved, not against his will, in a scheme to steal a famous and controversial painting from the State Art Gallery.

This is a wonderfully compelling story, based, I'm told on a true theft. The atmosphere of Fitzroy is captured with great skill and the characters and their foibles are real. A book to read in a couple of intense sittings.

~ Peter Smith (Author of the bestselling children's book, Monsieur Albert Rides to Glory)


You can listen online to Chris Womersley discuss his novel with Daniel Browning here on ABC Books and Arts Daily.

Cairo
Chris Womersley

Buy this book at Abbey's (131 York Street Sydney) ~ An Aladdin's cave for readers

The Sky So Heavy by Claire Zorn ~ Abbey's Bookseller Pick

ABBEY'S BOOKSELLER PICK ----- Fin is your typical teenage boy, growing up in the lower Blue Mountains, getting through school, mucking around with his friends, trying to impress the girl of his dreams. But one day nuclear bombs are detonated in the northern hemisphere, and not only are whole countries obliterated, but the climate changes literally overnight. A bitterly cold winter has set in. With his mother in Sydney, his father gone off to appease his second wife the night before the bombs and not returned, and a younger brother to look after, Fin suddenly has to grow up. Supplies run out, water is contaminated, and society reverts to each for themselves.

A cracking, page-turning novel for readers 13 and up, in the style of John Marsden’s Tomorrow series.

~ Lindy Jones (ABA Text Publishing Bookseller of the Year 2011)


The Sky So Heavy
Claire Zorn

Buy this book at Abbey's (131 York Street Sydney) ~ An Aladdin's cave for readers

The Swan Book by Alexis Wright ~ Abbey's Bookseller Pick

ABBEY'S BOOKSELLER PICK ----- How to describe this amazing, complicated and intellectually demanding novel? It is full of inventive wordplay, chorus-like mutterings from the wings of the main theatre, splintered and fragmentary narratives.

It is angry, and playful, and colourful. It is about discrimination – against and within refugees, indigenes, country-dwellers. The main character, Oblivia, does not speak, but the ghosts of (some of) her past do. The woman who saves her from the abuses of her childhood is a great storyteller, full of tales of swans from a different hemisphere.

Climate change has intensified the problems of society, but the land remains essential to a sense of identity. Politics is as useless to the ordinary person as it ever was, but hero-worship remains important to national pride. Cultural misappropriation is rife, but it isn't always the fault of the non-indigenous.

All these elements make for a coruscating story, a 'modernist' novel that takes some effort to get into, but which is well and truly worth the time.

~ Lindy Jones (ABA Text Publishing Bookseller of the Year 2011)


The Swan Book
Alexis Wright

Buy this book at Abbey's (131 York Street Sydney) ~ An Aladdin's cave for readers

Blood & Beauty by Sarah Dunant ~ Abbey's Bookseller Pick

ABBEY'S BOOKSELLER PICK ----- If you enjoyed Hilary Mantel's account of Cromwell in the court of Henry VIII and need something to fill in the time until the third book in the trilogy, then I commend this novel as a fine alternative!

Told in an immediate and vivid style, this will do for the Borgias what Mantel has done for Cromwell: bring historical figures into colourful life. Rodrigo Borgia is a complicated man full of roaring life and passion, not to mention an insatiable appetite for power; a Spaniard in Rome who buys his way to the Papacy, holy in theory, but corrupt in practice. He uses his children as pawns in his ambition to create a dynasty, and lets nothing get in the way of his desires, either political or personal.

I became thoroughly immersed in the time and characters and it was such an enjoyable experience that I had trouble finding something new to read after having lived in renaissance Rome! Having read a bit of history I found the novel managed all those complicated alliances and cross-currents very smoothly and felt very 'true' when dealing with the Borgias themselves. The imagery was lush and almost touchable, but as I am an admirer of Dunant's writing I expect that of her, so I wasn't disappointed.

Like Mantel's interpretation of Cromwell, I find myself very much looking forward to the concluding novel. Even though I know what happens in historical accounts, I want to know how Dunant will tell their story, and having to wait a couple more years to find out seems unfair!

~ Lindy Jones (ABA Text Publishing Bookseller of the Year 2011)


Blood & Beauty
Sarah Dunant

Available at Abbey's (131 York Street Sydney) ~ An Aladdin's cave for readers

MaddAddam by Margaret Atwood ~ Abbey's Bookseller Pick

ABBEY'S BOOKSELLER PICK ----- It's taken a couple of years but the final book in the trilogy is here, that ties up the events of Oryx and Crake and The Year of the Flood – and it was worth the wait!

It starts from the point where the second book left off, but as with the other books, moves between the present and the past quite smoothly. In this volume, Toby, ex-God's Gardener who has survived the plague released by Crake upon the world, is the main narrator. She finds herself telling to the neo-human Crakers, the stories Zeb has told her. As the survivors of the plague work out the ways to live in the transformed world and also how to combat the evil inadvertently released, Toby and Zeb's stories intertwine.

A lot more complicated to review than to read, Maddaddam is a wonderfully constructed novel, full of surprisingly light touches (Toby's bedtime stories to the child-like Crakers can be very funny), gripping story-lines, imaginative wordplay and a plausible world future that may not be so very far away… Fabulous stuff!

~ Lindy Jones (ABA Text Publishing Bookseller of the Year 2011)


MaddAddam
Margaret Atwood

Available at Abbey's (131 York Street Sydney) ~ An Aladdin's cave for readers

STILLWAYS: A Memoir by Steve Bisley ~ Abbey's Bookseller Pick

ABBEY'S BOOKSELLER PICK ----- The well-known and talented Australian actor can also write – beautifully! This is his memoir of childhood and school days, spent on the central coast. The 1950s and 60s are a foreign country now, but Bisley evokes the innocence and accepted violence of those days without sentiment.

The joys of the local show or Cracker Night, of catching a feed of prawns with his family, of mucking about with good mates, of being a young tearaway pushing the boundaries of allowable behaviour – all these and more are described in clean and unforced prose.

So too the darker moments of living with a father who had an unpredictable, violent and nasty streak, who thrashed his wife and children for perceived infractions.

There is no rancour in the retelling of these painful episodes, just a kind of mute acceptance; but they are more often hinted at than dwelt on. The book ends with Bisley being offered his first job after leaving school. I hope there will be a book of his further adventures, I enjoyed this one so much!

~ Lindy Jones (ABA Text Publishing Bookseller of the Year 2011)


Stillways - A Memoir
Steve Bisley

Available at Abbey's (131 York Street Sydney) ~ An Aladdin's cave for readers