Notes from Eve Abbey • June 2019

NEW RELEASES

I have just read and thoroughly enjoyed the third book by Carrie Tiffany who is a most original Australian writer. This latest one is called Exploded View, by which is meant the sort of diagrams you might find in a car manual. It all ties in.

The story is told in the voice of an adolescent girl who has not spoken for many weeks. Most of the time the family is securely placed in a car on a long drive, perhaps to Perth. The narrator is very imaginative and makes many observant and amusing remarks in her head but there is an atmosphere of fear. Something bad is happening and bit by bit it becomes clear.

I recommend all three of her books which also include Mateship with Birds (which was the winner of the first Stella Prize in 2013 and also shortlisted for the Miles Franklin Literary Award in the same year) and Everyman’s Rules for Scientific Living, her debut which also took out a slew of awards and shortlistings.

Carrie Tiffany recently appeared at the 2019 Sydney Writers’ Festival and I made sure I got a ticket for that session.

I’ve also had a good time reading an exciting thriller written by Catherine Steadman called Something in the Water. It begins with the narrator digging a grave for her husband in the Norfolk Woods. How did this come about? Short sharp sentences. All very exciting. The author is also an actress who appeared in Downton Abbey, as Mabel Lane Fox (I think she was a rival to Lady Mary in the marriage stakes in the later episodes).

I’ve already reminded you in my previous post, that on Abbey’s Home Page there are separate squares for you to check the stock we have here for Cambridge University Press and Oxford University Press. Other very useful boxes are the box directing you to Penguin Black Classics and Popular Penguins. You can choose to browse through the 'in stock' titles or to look at the entire wonderful range. We can, of course, order any title for you for prompt delivery.


Happy reading, Eve

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

Notes from Eve Abbey ~ May 2016

Charlotte Wood’s latest book, The Natural Way of Things has won the Independent Booksellers’ Book of the Year Award and also The Stella Prize. And no wonder.

This is not a charming story. I had to read it in short bursts. The writing is brilliant – good enough to read aloud. The story concerns a small group of young women who have been duped, captured and imprisoned in a remote, deserted and decaying outback station. They all have one thing in common. They have been involved in a sexual scandal concerning an older, powerful man. There is an electric fence around the perimeter of the valley and they are “looked after” by two men and a woman who seem capable only of derision and insults. Be sure to read this.

Each new book from Charlotte Wood strikes out in a new direction but each time she displays her incisive depiction of people and places. Her previous books include The Children; Love and Hunger: Thoughts on the Gift of Food; The Submerged Cathedral; Animal People, and Brothers & Sisters: Anthology of Stories from some well-known Australian authors. The Submerged Cathedral was short-listed for the Miles Franklin.

I’m now reading Julian Barnes’ latest book called The Noise of Time. Reviewers have called this a masterpiece and so it seems. In this slender book, the third person narrative refers to three different periods in the life of Russian composer, Dmitri Shoskatovich, his troubled relationship with Stalin and the Communist Party, and his efforts to retain his artistic integrity. Very moving. If you know anything of the life of this famous composer you will find extra enjoyment in this. You could also read Testimony: The Memoirs of Dmitri Shoskatovich edited by Solomon Volkov.

The very best news for Helen Garner was announced recently. She is one of the recipients of the 2016 Windham-Campbell Prizes which means she is awarded a little more than $200,000 as one of the Non-fiction awards in this generous but little known prize which does not ask for entrants. Many of her readers will be pleased for her. Her three most famous books are The First Stone, This House of Grief: The Story of a Murder Trial and Joe Cinque's Consolation: A True Story of Death, Grief and the Law. We also have stock of True Stories: Selected Non Fiction as well as the fiction which first made her famous – The Children’s Bach, Postcards from Surfers and Monkey Grip. Her latest book is titled Everywhere I Look which Lindy Jones has described as "Drawn from articles she has contributed to different journals/papers/books over the past decade or two, and loosely organised by theme, each is a small but perfect jewel, or a quiet sip of sanity in an increasingly incoherent world."

The inimitable Robyn Williams has written to celebrate his show on Radio National. It is called In Love with Betty the Crow: The First 40 Years of ABC RN’s THE SCIENCE SHOW –a show which he describes as “a selection of compelling conversations”. Fans of the show, like me, will really enjoy this and others will be enticed to become regular listeners.

Biographer Suzanne Falkiner has chosen a better-known subject for her latest book, called Mick: A Life of Randolph Stow. She has had access to an enormous amount of letters and diaries and of course interviews with friends still living, so this is a very detailed account of the life of Stow, regarded as one of our greatest writers. He was the second winner of the Miles Franklin Award and has also received the Patrick White Award. There is a new edition of his poetry The Land’s Meaning: New Selected Poems and you will find many poems quoted in the biography. We have stock of his fiction including To The Islands, Visitants, Tourmaline, The Girl Green as Elderflower, The Suburbs of Hell, Merry-go-Round in the Sea and Midnite.

Did you read Penguin and the Lane Brothers: The Untold Story of a Publishing Revolution by Stuart Kells? If you did you will know already that Richard, one of the younger brothers of Sir Allen Lane, came to Australia as part of a scheme to train young men as farmers. They were known as the Barwell Boys, named after a Premier of South Australia, who began the scheme. And you will know that Richard is the brother most interested in writing. At only eighteen years of age he kept an excellent diary about his adventures, good and bad, in a very foreign country, which he regularly sent home to his parents in Bristol. He was in the country three years and moved from filthy shack to grand house, complete with billiard table. These diaries have now been edited by Stuart Kells and his wife Fiona, as well as Richard’s daughter and granddaughter. They prove to be a fascinating, well written account of rural life in Australia between the wars. Very enjoyable.

Did you like the Man Booker Prize-winning novel by Yann Martell called Life of Pi? If you did you will be ready for another challenge in his new book The High Mountains of Portugal which also features animals in strange places. Take the plunge for this is a beautifully written book – part ghost story, part fable, part quest.

Booker Prize winner Anita Brookner died in March, in her eighties. She seems to be out of favour as only a few of her novels appear as in stock at Abbey's but there was a time when we would have all of her titles in stock. And that might mean 23 or 24. Although she was in her fifties before she began writing fiction, after that she published a new novel almost every year. I know I waited anxiously for the next one! She was a lecturer at the Courtauld Institute, and like an art historian, she was able to tease out the meaning in her stories. The first one, called A Start in Life, began with the remark ‘Dr Weiss, at forty, knew her life had been ruined by literature.’ As soon as I saw that I knew I must read it. Her stories were mostly about middle-aged females suffering isolation or disappointment. One critic famously remarked “I could strangle her characters with the sleeves of their own cardigans”. Nevertheless I recommend these finely crafted stories. Try your library if no luck at Abbey’s. Her most famous title was Hotel du Lac which won the Booker Prize.

I was eagerly awaiting the new book from Graham Swift, author of Last Orders, Waterland an England and Other Stories. It is called Mothering Sunday: A Romance and is set in 1924. Orphan Jane Fairchild, maid in an affluent middle-class household, has nowhere to visit until she receives a secret phone call from her lover, the charismatic son of her employers’ friends and neighbour. An intense day follows as Jane visits him in his own house, which she has been instructed she must enter by the front door. As the day proceeds small hints are offered to the reader. Perhaps all is not well? Jane becomes a famous author who carefully avoids this day when interviewers ask her about her youth. This is a lovely book. Very English!

Keep well,

Eve

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

The Forgotten Rebels of Eureka by Clare Wright wins 2014 The Stella Prize

THE FORGOTTEN REBELS OF EUREKA by Clare Wright

WINNER – The 2014 STELLA PRIZE

The winner of the Stella Prize, the major new award for Australian women’s writing, receives $50,000 in prize money. This is the first time a nonfiction work has won the Stella Prize. Last year’s inaugural winner was Carrie Tiffany for her novel Mateship with Birds.

Of the winning book, Kerryn Goldsworthy, chair of the 2014 Stella Prize judging panel, says:

“The Forgotten Rebels of Eureka sheds a bright new light on a dark old Australian story. In her account of the Eureka Stockade and the years leading up to it, historian Clare Wright revisits that well-trodden territory from an entirely new perspective, unearthing images, portraits and stories of the women of 1850s Ballarat and the parts they played not only in its society but also in its public life, as they ran newspapers, theatres and hotels with energy and confidence.

“A rare combination of true scholarship with a warmly engaging narrative voice, along with a wealth of detail about individual characters and daily life on the goldfields, makes this book compulsively readable.”

On winning the Stella Prize, Clare Wright says:

“No one writes books to win prizes, but holy flip it feels astonishingly good to have won the Stella. Of all the prizes on offer, I reckon this one is the sweetest of all. The Stella Prize is like the Brownlow Medal of the literary world: all muscle and spine, with a touch of glamour. Without fail, the books on the 2014 Stella short and long lists demonstrate astonishing grunt, tenacity, courage, grace, vision, skill and sheer determination to reveal the world at its potential fairest. The Stella helps to keep the playing field at its level best. I am honoured to be in the company of these brilliant authors.

“My thanks to the Stella judges, the Stella board, the many donors and sponsors who make this a truly grassroots award, my family for their constant love and support in the face of absence and Eureka madness, and to my magnificent publishers, Text Publishing, for taking the plunge on a big book of historical nonfiction about a bunch of noisy sheilas getting up to no good on the nineteenth-century frontier.”

The 2014 Stella Prize was awarded at an event in Sydney on the evening of Tuesday 29 April. The winner received $50,000 and each of the other shortlistees received $2000, courtesy of the Nelson Meers Foundation.

At the award night, Clare Wright announced that she would donate10% of the prize money to be split between two organisations close to her heart:

“The first is the Indigenous Literacy Foundation (ILF), who work at a community level to raise literacy levels and close the gap in educational outcomes between indigenous and non-indigenous Australians. $2500 will allow the ILF to get 20 early literacy kits in the Book Buzz project into the hands of families (mothers, babies and toddlers) in the family engagement program that is run in Alice Springs through the Central Australian Aboriginal Congress.

“The second is my local high school, whose dedicated teachers work within the constraints of an under-funded public system to give all our kids the benefits of the free, secular education that is their birthright in a democratic nation. I will donate $2500 to Northcote High School, to be held in trust to fund an annual academic award, the Eureka Prize for Women’s History.”

Clare Wright is an historian who has worked as a political speechwriter, university lecturer, historical consultant, and radio and television broadcaster. Her first book, Beyond the Ladies Lounge: Australia’s Female Publicans, garnered both critical and popular acclaim. The Forgotten Rebels of Eureka, her second book, took her ten years to research and write. She lives in Melbourne with her husband and three children.

The Stella Prize is open to works of both fiction and nonfiction. From more than 160 entries, this year’s Stella Prize judges – critic and writer Kerryn Goldsworthy (chair); journalist and broadcaster Annabel Crabb; author and academic Brenda Walker; bookseller Fiona Stager; and writer and lecturerTony Birch – selected a longlist of twelve books, which they then narrowed down to a shortlist of six. View the lists below.

The paperback edition is due out from 8 May 2014.

Earn Double Reward Points on this book during May (and earn your $10 voucher faster).

THE STELLA SHORTLIST
Burial Rites	Hannah Kent
Night Games	Anna Krien
The Night Guest	Fiona McFarlane
Boy, Lost: A Family Memoir	Kristina Olsson
The Swan Book	Alexis Wright
The Forgotten Rebels of Eureka	Clare Wright
TITLES THAT MADE THE STELLA LONGLIST
Letter to George Clooney	Debra Adelaide
Moving Among Strangers: Randolph Stow and My Family	Gabrielle Carey
Mullumbimby	Melissa Lucashenko
The Misogyny Factor	Anne Summers
Madeleine: A Life of Madeleine St John	Helen Trinca
All the Birds, Singing	Evie Wyld

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