The Diary of a Nobody

After listening to an episode of the Secret Life of Books podcast, I remembered how much I'd enjoyed reading George and Weedon Grossmith's The Diary of a Nobody while I was at school, and in a fit of nostalgia, borrowed it from the local library. I was quite surprised they had it, as they turn over their catalogue pretty fast, and Diary was first published in 1892.

SLOB alerted me to the class dimensions of the hunour -- I don't think I grasped, as a fourteen year old, that we were supposed to be laughing at the small pretensions and anxious respectability of the lower-middle class Pooters, as well as Charles' minor mishaps (painting the bath red) and feeble Dad jokes (you are talking a lot of dry rot yourself!). And I can't agree with Evelyn Waugh, who apparently described it as 'the funniest book in the world.' But I very much appreciated spending time in the Pooters' suburban world, trundling along in their comfortable social groove. It was extraordinary how relatable some of their problems still are: worrying about what to wear to a special event, fretting over their twenty year old son's life choices, getting in a huff over an offensive remark.

Most of all, I enjoyed this quiet celebration of modest lives. Pooter takes a refreshing pride in his lack of ambition, his desire to do his duty and keep his head down, and while I'm not sure if we are supposed to admire his humility and low-key virtues of fidelity and honesty, I can't help cheering for him and his 'dear Carrie.'
 

The Star of Kazan

I think I've now read just about all of Eva Ibbotson's books, but The Star of Kazan is a particularly good example of her formula. Reading an Ibbotson book is like sinking into a warm, fragrant bath; it's wonderful comfort reading. The Star of Kazan features an orphan girl (as usual, kind, generous and good at cooking!) who is unexpectedly whisked away from her close community in Vienna by a noblewoman claiming to be her long lost mother. The twist is that, while Annika's Viennese 'family' was warm, happy and comfortable, the grand household at Sittal with the von Tannenburgs is cold, miserable and poverty stricken. But wait! Some good fortune comes Edeltraut's way... but is it connected with Annika?

There is the usual cast of kind, capable boys, a courageous horse, some gypsies, a loyal bookish friend, delicious food, a cruel boarding school, missing jewels, and generous dollops of humour and pathos before everything comes right in the end. I can't believe I lasted so long without being exposed to Eva Ibbotson's work; it is so delightful. I would class The Star of Kazan as a children's book. Though some of her other novels straddle the line between young adult and adult, this one is perfectly safe (apart from one reference to suicide).
 

Angel with Two Faces

Angel With Two Faces, volume two in Nicola Upson's Josephine Tey murder mystery series sees Tey staying in Cornwall to write a new novel, at the childhood home of her closest friends, Ronnie and Lettice Motley, and their police detective cousin, Archie Penrose. Soon they are all deeply entangled in local secrets: the unexpected death of a young man which has left his two sisters bereft, and then the murder of a curate who apparently knew more than he should.

The Penrose estate, Loe Pool and the amazing clifftop Macklin Theatre are all real places, though Upson has taken liberties in allowing her fictional characters to be so thoroughly embedded in their history. The character 'Jospehine Tey' occupies an interesting space between fiction and reality, as it was a pseudonym for writer Elizabeth Mackintosh; 'Josephine' never actually existed. I can see how this light fictionalisation gives Upson a degree of freedom to play with Tey's personal history and character.

Angel With Two Faces centres around some darkly disturbing secrets (at one point I thought it was going to go even darker, but it pulled back), but it's worth it for Upson's assured writing and the intelligent, compassionate characters of Josephine and Archie, who share their own complicated history. I think there are now eleven books in the series, all set in my favourite period between the wars, and featuring real and imagined figures from theatre and literature. I will definitely be going back for more.
 

The Chronicles of Narnia and Philosophy

With the rather twee subtitle, The Lion, The Witch and the Worldview, The Chronicles of Narnia and Philosophy (2005) is part of a series that also contains titles about Seinfeld, baseball, The Matrix, Buffy the Vampire Slayer and many more pop culture products (the Woody Allen volume might not have aged too well). It's a collection of essays on various philosophical topics, for example, 'Trusting Lucy: Believing the Incredible,' 'No Longer a Friend: Gender in Narnia' (this came out at about the same time as Neil Gaiman's famous essay, The Problem of Susan), and 'Worthy of a Better God: Religious Diversity and Salvation in The Chronicles of Narnia.' You get the gist.

As with any collection, some of the essays are better than others, and there are quite a few from an openly Christian evangelical standpoint, which is not surprising. It was interesting to see how often the same moments in the Chronicles kept coming up, examined from different angles: when Lucy, but no one else, sees Aslan trying to lead them a particular way, and struggles to convince the others to follow him; similarly, Peter and Susan worrying about Lucy's sanity when she first returns from inside the wardrobe; the dwarfs in The Last Battle who refuse to see that they have entered Paradise; the Lady in The Silver Chair who tries to convince Puddleglum and the others that the underworld is the only reality, and that Narnia above ground is just a dream (it's all in Plato!)

It was interesting to note that there were relatively few references to my favourite of the books, The Voyage of the Dawn Treader, and many quotes from my least favourite, The Last Battle, which is the most obviously didactic and religious. I have always loved these books, they are part of the fabric of my imagination, and despite their many problematic aspects, I suspect I always will.
 

Return to Sender

First of all, what a beautiful cover! It's a work of art. Hazel Lam was shortlisted for a book design award for this cover and rightly so, it's gorgeous. Lauren Draper's debut novel, Return to Sender, is next on my list of CBCA Notables, and it's a novel with a lot going on: a returning delinquent, a group of friends, a mystery, a simmering romance, historical pain, a secret house in the woods, a cache of mystery letters...

As anyone who has read Dear Swoosie will know, I am a sucker for a cache of mystery letters. In this case, Brodie and her delightfully eccentric grandmother actually live in a post office with a Dead Letter Office attached, so there is plenty of scope for mysteries and possibly even ghosts. But the heart of the story lies in the tight bonds between Brodie, her gay bestie Elliot (and his boyfriend), and heart throb frenemy Levi, all of whom have families with suffering in their pasts.

At times I felt a little unmoored in the landscape of Return to Sender, possibly because it enjoyed a simultaneous Australian and US publication which might have left it hovering between the two countries. The lake and the woods felt more American than Oz, though the wildlife and vegetation was fairly non-specific. Even a reference to the local police department coded US to me. It's all carefully internationally flavoured, nothing to scare the horses (I may have a bias here, as Crow Country was rejected by US publishers as 'too Australian!') Return to Sender apparently began life as a Covid book, and I can't think of a better way of spending lockdown than in spinning this layered, heartfelt novel.
 

Slay

I originally borrowed Brittney Morris's 2019 novel Slay for research into role playing games (more on that later, perhaps), but it actually turned out to be a lively, nuanced story about race and identity. From the first page I was plunged into an unfamiliar Black American culture, which sent me scurrying to the internet for a crash course in terms like twist outs, Hotep and Ebonics.

Our protagonist Kiera has a secret life: after enduring racism in other video games, she has developed and runs a safe online community where thousands of participants duel using cards based on Black culture (skating over how plausible this is for a high school student with a lot of other commitments and a limited budget...) But when one of the players is murdered in real life, (white) people start to ask questions, and Kiera starts questioning herself. Is Slay a safe space, or is it racist and exclusionary? Is it a violent place, or a place of safety and support? Kiera's own vehemently pro-Black boyfriend is against the game, but he doesn't know that Kiera invented it.

Slay is a hugely engaging, pacy novel that confronts important issues in a complex and relatable way; it would make a brilliant class text. Not surprisingly, it's been immensely popular, and despite the necessary suspension of disbelief, I was totally caught up in it.

Miss Caroline Bingley, Private Detective

I've been looking forward to Miss Caroline Bingley, Private Detective since I first saw that it was on the horizon, and it did not disappoint. It made me appreciate the character of Caroline Bingley in a whole new way; I pictured her as Anna Chancellor in BBC Pride and Prejudice throughout: haughty, slightly arrogant perhaps, but intelligent, determined and curious -- all fabulous traits for a private detective.

Gardiner and Kumar have taken Caroline Bingley's personality and gleefully run with it, setting up a plausible mystery involving Georgiana Darcy's missing ladies' maid, the East India Company, smuggling, the slave trade, and (to paraphrase a long ago Dr Who episode) a wonderfully violent butler. There are some gorgeous scenes on the frozen Thames, lively drawing room banter, and thoughtful social commentary, as well as plenty of criminal action. It would have been so difficult to pursue wrongdoers without the benefit of mobile phones (or indeed any phones), cars or a fully functional police force.

I can't wait for further adventures of Miss Caroline Bingley, and I'm sure Jane Austen, though she might have been nonplussed, would thoroughly approve.

A World to Build

The history of Britain immediately after the Second World War is a period I know very little about. David Kynaston has written two books about Austerity Britain: A World to Build covers the years 1945-1948, and its sequel, Smoke in the Valley, takes us from 1948 to 1951.

Kynaston's method is to divide his narrative between the voices of ordinary (and sometimes not ordinary) people, expressed in diaries, Mass Observation interviews, letters and newspapers, and a broader political narrative tracing events in Parliament, policy development, elections and party conferences. I must admit the minutiae of Labour and Conservative party machinations made my eyes glaze over, though the story of the determination to establish a more equitable, yes, socialist, community after the war has its own fascination. As well as setting up the National Health Service, and nationalising many industries, there was an imperative to build new housing -- a struggle with interesting parallels to Australia at the moment.

But I must confess that I found the everyday observations of daily life riveting: complaints about food rationing and other shortages, a terrible freezing winter with low coal supplies, the ubiquity of the black market and 'spivs,' the beginning of ex-colonial immigration with the arrival of the Windrush from Jamaica, moans from the establishment about working class's apparent addiction to cinema and greyhound racing. A more egalitarian future was contemplated with horror by some and satisfaction by others, but it was very difficult to shift class attitudes and prejudice. This was played out clearly in education reforms, which did aspire to offer greater opportunity to bright working class children, but not at the expense of dismantling the public school system -- a bastion of class privilege that Australia seems sadly determined to cement here.

My Family and Other Suspects

Next on my CBCA Notables list was My Family and Other Suspects by Kate Emery. Yet another YA crime novel! This one was a hoot from start to finish: a kind of YA Benjamin Stevenson (Everyone in My Family Has Killed Someone), with a lower body count and a dose of teen romance, and knowing asides to the reader. Fourteen year old Ruth is about to go home after a family holiday on her step-grandmother's isolated farm, when a suspicious death forces everyone to stay longer. Ruth and sort-of cousin Dylan set themselves to solve the many mysteries and secrets swirling through the extended family, to a dangerous and satisfying denouement.

Maybe the CBCA judges decided to eliminate all the crime stories from their shortlist, but in my opinion, My Family and Other Suspects should have been on it. It's deft and funny, smart and self-aware (and gets extra points from me for including McCullochs in the story -- one of my own family names). Murder and humour make a winning combination if you can pull it off, and Emery does so brilliantly. A joy to read.
 

Arthur Ransome and Capt Flint's Trunk

For a Swallows and Amazons fan, Christina Hardyment's Arthur Ransome and Capt Flint's Trunk was a pure delight from start to finish. Published in 1984, it came out forty years ago -- less than the 37 years which had passed between the publication of the final S&A book in 1947 and this labour of love.

Hardyment visits the locations of all the S&A novels and hunts for real life parallels in geography and characters. The lake of the first adventures is a combination of Coniston and Windemere, but most of the terrain seems faithfully copied from one or the other (with the exception of the Swallowdale valley, which she leaves for future readers to pin down). She is greatly aided by the contents of Ransome's trunk, now in an archive, which contains notes, drawings, maps and unpublished material, much of which is shared here.

Hardyment was also able to interview many of the children (now adults) who inspired the characters, like the Altounyan family (including the real life Titty and Brigit!) and gather their recollections of Ransome. Most of these people are sadly dead now, so it's wonderful that Hardyment took the opportunity when it was available. She explores some of the waterways by windsurfing -- much easier for a solo sailor! -- and includes many photographs of Ransome, his boats and various children posing for the book illustrations.

One marvellous inclusion is a draft first chapter for Peter Duck, showing Captain Flint and the S&As beginning to invent the story of Peter Duck, which was eventually published without this framing device, but showing how different the final book might have been.

Arthur Ransome and Capt Flint's Trunk is the kind of treasure I scour Brotherhood Books for -- a delicious treat and one I will definitely devour again.
 

Help Yourself

How many stories do you need to make a collection? In the case of Curtis Sittenfeld's Help Yourself, it's THREE. Not complaining about the quality, but a volume of well under a hundred pages has trouble qualifying as a book, in my opinion! This is the problem with buying sight unseen from Brotherhood Books -- of course I don't take note of the number of pages when I'm eagerly clicking Add to Basket.  

Having said that, the stories themselves are excellent: wry, self-aware, slightly painful. In White Women LOL, a middle class woman makes some ill-judged remarks at a bar, and pays the price in community  and self-judgment; Creative Differences ponders the trade-offs between commercialism, art, exposure and money. Show Don't Tell deliciously returns to one of Sittenfeld's favourite arenas, the world of students, this time creative writing students, but enlarges the horizon with the inclusion of a difficult housemate.

I devoured these stories in a single greedy gulp, but they've just left me hungry for more.

 

A Language of Limbs

I heard Dylin Hardcastle's recent novel, A Language of Limbs, recommended on the ABC Book Shelf program. It's a kind of sliding doors story. Two young girls, growing up in regional NSW in the 1970s, choose different life paths. In 'limb one,' she acts on her lesbian desires, is thrown out of home, makes her way to Sydney and finds a new community, under siege from the law and social opprobrium and soon to be ravaged by AIDS, but also joyful, loving and supportive. In 'limb two,' she suppresses her illicit feelings and follows a more conventional journey, through university and marriage, but still facing personal tragedy.

For quite a while I thought these two characters might be alternate universe versions of each other, their experiences eerily echoing or brushing up against each other; but they do come together at the very end. There was a bit more poetry than I'm really comfortable with (I'm a bit allergic to poetry), but this is a beautifully written and constructed novel that also provides an overview of queer history in the 20th century, quite a bit of which I remember living through. There's probably more sex in it than I'm really comfortable with, too, but each to their own! A Language of Limbs is a wonderful, deeply emotional, moving and passionate novel.
 

Stay Well Soon

By chance, I read Emily Gale's comments on Penny Tangey's Stay Well Soon just as I was in the middle of reading it. Gale was writing about funny books, and complained that no one would ever guess that Stay Well Soon is a funny book by looking at the 'sad girl on the cover.' She pointed out that Stay Well Soon is a sad book, too, and it is -- it's a book about sibling illness, cancer, death and dying -- but seen through the eyes of our narrator, eleven year old Stevie, it's also very droll and delightful to read.

Stevie is a great protagonist. She's having friendship problems, and all she wants from life is a pony. She fantasises about riding her dream horse, Atta Girl, along beaches and through the desert, communicating telepathically. 'She'll let me know when the campfire is going out.' But when her brother gets sick, suddenly everything revolves around Ryan and his hospital treatments. Very plausibly, Stevie tries to push away her knowledge about what this might mean, but reality intrudes.

I loved Stevie, her friendship with Lara from the hospital, her family, her harassed Mum, who we can see is barely holding on, 'Dad Ben,' new friend Morgan, teacher Mr Parks. There are lots of funny schoolyard scenes, like when the group play Kidnappers and even more when they're playing Royal Family. I absolutely loved Stay Well Soon and Tangey strikes the perfect balance between poignant and snort-giggle.
 

The Pangs of Love

I'd forgotten how much I love Jane Gardam's writing, though I was very sad to hear of her death just a couple of months ago. I'd previously read some (but not all) of the short stories in 1983's The Pangs of Love in a big fat story collection I acquired years ago, but enough time had passed that I was able to enjoy them freshly.

The collection opens with The First Adam, a story from the point of view of a familiar Gardam type, an expatriate engineer who has lived abroad for years without compromising his essentially English outlook. He feels sorry for an older woman by the pool, invites her to a drink in his room, but doesn't try to seduce her, ultimately more absorbed in his work. Fittingly, the collection ends with The Last Adam, told from the woman's point of view -- and she actually has a more interesting backstory than the bloke, and she in turn feels sorry for him, and calls him 'the poor old man.' The title story, a rewrite of the tale of the Little Mermaid, was probably my least favourite.

Many of these stories centre around a disconnection between appearance and reality, between perception and truth, image and fact. I could understand criticism of Gardam for her narrow English, middle class lens and perhaps for exoticising some of her settings: India, Hong Kong, Malta, Italy, are always seen through colonial eyes. But I respect the honesty of that; and I can forgive a lot for the sharpness of her writing and the poignancy of her characters.
 

Maria Petranelli Is Prepared for Anything (Except This)

Still reading my way through the Notables list. Maria Petranelli is Prepared for Anything (Except This) won the Ampersand Prize for first-time author Elisa Chenoweth, and while this book didn't make it to the shortlist, it's a very cute novel. Sixteen year old Maria has built a defensive shell to protect herself from her bossy, intrusive (but very loving) Italian family, and her impulsive decision to go on student exchange to Italy is part of separating herself from their influence. But the trip is not straightforward. Not only does Maria meet an exciting new friend, Kennedy, but both girls become tangled in murder, kidnapping, corruption and undercover police officers.

MPIPFA (ET) is part frenetic adventure story, part sweet queer romance, with some Italian travelogue thrown in. It's quite a ride, often funny, though it took me a little while to settle into Chenoweth's style. At times Maria seemed closer to twelve than sixteen, burgeoning romance notwithstanding; in fact, now I'm thinking about it, perhaps the style of the book reads more as junior fiction, while the subject matter is YA? Maria's grandparents also seemed to belong to a generation older than they actually were -- perhaps Chenoweth's own family memories might have played a part there!

I very much enjoyed Maria Petranelli, especially as it reminded me of my own backpacking trips to Italy when I was a few years older than MP (where I behaved like a twelve year old myself, to be honest). I'm looking forward to seeing what Elisa Chenoweth Does Next.

Searching for the Secret River

Having read Kate Grenville's brilliant Unsettled not long ago, it seemed like fate when Searching for the Secret River popped up on Brotherhood Books. It made a very interesting companion read, because it covers some of the same ground, but from quite a different angle. As a writer, it was fascinating to follow Grenville through the process of writing this big, important, successful novel, from the first scratch of interest in her family history and the stories handed down, all the way to the final edit, and the multitude of decisions along the way. In Unsettled, the emphasis is squarely on her awareness and assumptions about First Peoples, and interrogating the family stories with fresh knowledge. One of the very first prompts for rethinking came early on, when a First Nations writer helped Grenville to query what 'taking up land' really meant -- it meant 'taking.'

This is a story Grenville also tells in Unsettled; it was clearly a formative moment. Despite its wide success, The Secret River was not an uncontroversial novel. It was criticised for not including the voices of its Aboriginal characters; Grenville reveals that was a deliberate, and in its own way, respectful choice. Inga Clendinnen fiercely argued that Grenville confused history and fiction; I'm not sure that's true. The project of fiction is not the same as the project of history, and Grenville is aware of that all the way through.

I'm so glad I read this book, though it might not be as totally fascinating for everyone. It got me through a long night in the emergency department of our local hospital, if nothing else!
 

Three Days in June

I had completely forgotten that I'd reserved Anne Tyler's latest novel, Three Days in June, at the library, and by coincidence, my turn arrived just after I'd finished reading Dinner at the Homesick Restaurant. It's a very slim novel, almost a novella really, just over 150 pages, and it's a distillation of all Anne Tyler's more sprawling family sagas into a compressed time frame: the wedding day of Gail's daughter, Debbie; the day before, and the day after. But as with all Tyler's novels, it reaches back through time to see how we ended up in this place, and in this case, looks forward to a future where past mistakes can be forgiven.

Three Days in June is a slight but enjoyable comfort read, gently funny, poignant, observant and compassionate. Many years ago, Gail blew up her marriage, but now Max, Debbie's father, is back for the wedding and apparently wondering why he allowed Gail to throw away what they had. This issue comes into sharp focus when we learn that, perhaps, perhaps not, Debbie's future husband might have made a mistake of his own. Unusually for Tyler, the narration is in the first person.

One of the back cover blurbs calls this book 'a joy to read in a single relaxing afternoon,' which strikes me as a perfect description.
 

Shadow Tag

I've been a fan of Louise Erdrich's novels for a while now, but I hadn't come across Shadow Tag from 2010. It's unlike the other Erdrich novels I've read in that it focuses in narrowly on the dynamics of a marriage and its ultimate breakdown. Irene America is the wife and muse to painter Gil, and mother of their three children. When she realises that Gil has been reading her diary, she starts to write deliberate lies for him to read; mistrust, alcohol and violence brew a destructive mix.

The parts of this novel I enjoyed the most were probably the sections written from the perspectives of the three children, who are trying to hold it together while their parents are falling apart. Erdrich writes exceptionally well about family relationships and the currents of feeling that flow between parents and children, and between siblings. As a parent of seven children and a survivor of several relationships, she obviously has a lot of experience in this area. 

I did pick up one slip, where a side character is referred to just once as 'Louise' rather than 'May.' Erdrich has written herself into at least one other novel as a character and I wonder if she initially intended to do the same here, changed her mind, and let this one reference slide through uncorrected. Shadow Tag feels like an outlier in Erdrich's oeuvre and while at first I feared it might be a dull middle class marriage story, there was a lot more going on -- about images, art and ownership, identity and parenthood.

Fishing in the Styx

 Ruth Park's second volume of autobiography, Fishing in the Styx (great title), picks up where the first left off, after her arrival from New Zealand to Australia in the middle of the Second World War and her marriage to D'Arcy Niland. The two managed to scratch out a living, against everyone's predictions, as full time writers, chiefly by never saying no to a commission and by entering every prize going. Park wrote thousands of radio scripts for children as well as the award-winning novel, The Harp in the South, informed by her own experience living in the slums of Surry Hills. I didn't realise that this book had been so hugely controversial at the time, with Park herself being publicly vilified for daring to write on such a topic. She (probably correctly) deduced that she attracted particular vitriol for being a) female and b) a foreigner. She went on to write many more books over several genres, fiction, non-fiction, children's and young adult.

Park and Niland's struggles are very moving and quite relatable to any working author! Still, they had five children and lived in various houses, occasionally travelling back to New Zealand to visit Park's family, and Park tells a beautiful and mysterious story of a visitation at the moment when her father died. Niland was haunted by a heart complaint which caused his own death at just 50, leaving her a widow with five half-grown children and a weighty burden of grief. Not surprisingly, the rest of her life was shaped by this terrible loss. She never remarried.

Fishing in the Styx is in some ways much sadder to read than A Fence Around the Cuckoo, but it's also the joyous story of a creative couple who never failed to support and encourage each other, even though Niland did do some characteristically male things, like claim the dining table as his work space without considering where Park might do her writing (the answer, predictably, was on her lap). My God, they worked so hard! This book was published in 1993, but Park lived until 2010, when she was 93, after a long, productive and richly lived life.

Liar's Test

  

Still continuing my read through the CBCA Notables list, and I've come to Liar's Test by established First Nations author Ambelin Kwaymullina. This is a briskly-paced speculative fiction novel, plunging the reader immediately into a detailed, fully formed world, where Bell Silverleaf, a member of the oppressed Treesingers, competes with six other girls to become Queen for the next twenty five years. There is a Hunger Games flavour to this structure, but there are more layers here. Bell's world has been colonised by a group of so-called 'gods,' who have attracted followers called the Risen to their various temples. But the world is really -- I think -- a sentient kind of spaceship? Or perhaps the whole world is sentient?

I must be getting old because while I enjoyed lots of elements of Liar's Test, I struggled to follow the revelations and the backstory at times. The story, packed with action, perhaps could have done with a few pauses to let the reader catch their breath and sort out the details. That said, the parallels with First Nations culture and the use of the church's and religion to oppress colonised people were very striking and really well handled. Female friendship and matriarchal power is celebrated, but there are strong and sympathetic male characters, too. Now I see that Liar's Test is book one of a proposed series, so perhaps I'll get some of the breathing space I'm looking for later down the track, because there is almost too much material here for just one book!

Go Set a Watchman

Is it really ten years since the controversial posthumous publication of Harper Lee's Go Set a Watchman? Not a sequel to To Kill A Mockingbird, as it was marketed at the time, even though it is set years after Mockingbird and with largely the same cast of characters -- if anything it's an early draft of that well-beloved book. I remember when Watchman was released and there was an outcry that this story had ruined the other, particularly by destroying the nobility of Atticus Finch.

So. What did I make of Go Set a Watchman? As a novel, it's ... not great. To Kill a Mockingbird is a deeper, better structured, more thoughtful, better developed story in every way. Go Set a Watchman revolves around twenty-something Jean Louise (Scout) becoming disillusioned with her father when she sees him being complicit with racism. It's all about growing up, standing by your own opinions. Atticus doesn't try to argue Jean Louise out of her New York liberal attitudes; instead he patronisingly explains why they won't work in Maycomb. Worse, her kindly uncle gives her a smack round the chops -- for her own good, you understand.

It's hard to read, and I can understand why so many people felt that wise, just Atticus had been besmirched. To Kill a Mockingbird has been a white saviour fantasy for so long, it's very hard to let it go, or at least to see it in a different context. It's a book of its time, and even though the attitudes it expresses would have been progressive for that time, they now seem timorous and wrong-headed. I winced more than once, and perhaps it would have been better to have left it in that bottom drawer, but reading Go Set a Watchman was an interesting exercise.
 

Ghost Wall

I saw Ghost Wall by Sarah Moss recommended by Penni Russon, who teaches it at uni, and instantly grabbed it from the library. Penni assured me I would love it, and I did. For such a short novel (less than 150 pages), it's incredibly powerful, weaving together questions of class and privilege, power, gendered violence, history and politics, into a seemingly simple but deeply charged situation.

Seventeen year old Sylvie is camping with her family, a handful of students and a professor, attempting to re-enact Iron Age lives -- fishing, foraging, hunting rabbits. Somehow the adult men end up doing the more exciting activities: hunting, drumming, constructing a 'ghost wall' hung with skulls to frighten the Romans away. Meanwhile, Sylvie and her mother, and the single female student, Molly, are stuck with washing the dishes, cooking, and searching for berries. But Sylvie's father, a bus driver with an unsavoury passion for what he imagines to be a more 'pure' British past, is simmering with frustration and the need to impress the professor, and violence is not far away.

Ghost Wall is a masterclass in tension -- even the first couple of pages are brimming with horror -- which builds like summer heat. References to the recently fallen Berlin Wall locate it in the early 1990s, perhaps a less informed time, when concepts like consent were not at the forefront of consciousness. Sylvie's dad is horrible, but he's also a fully rounded character, denied the privilege of a 'proper education' by entrenched class prejudice, trapped in a job that prevents him from spending time outside. I felt for her mum, too, walking on eggshells and longing for a 'sit down' (something Sylvie doesn't appreciate!)

Above all, Ghost Wall is shot through with the eerie presence of those former inhabitants whose lives the re-enactors are trying to imitate. This is a political and domestic novel, but it's also very creepy. Loved it, loved it, loved it.
 

Attention All Shipping

Attention All Shipping is a book I found in my father's collection, though I don't know if he ever actually read it. Published in 2004, it's a cute idea -- Charlie Connelly decided to travel around all the thirty-odd areas of the shipping forecast and report back on what he found, in a Bill Bryson-esque whimsical style. The shipping forecast is such an institution in Britain (I think it's only recently been removed from the main national radio broadcast) that even I was aware of it, though I was very hazy on the details. Some people fall asleep to the enigmatic near-poetry of the forecast, which follows a strict word limit and formula. An example might be: 'Tyne, Dogger. Northeast 3 or 4. Occasional rain. Moderate or poor.' This refers to the areas Tyne and Dogger off the east coast of England; wind direction and strength on the Beaufort Scale; precipitation; and visibility. The forecast follows a strict anti-clockwise order, and Connelly sticks to this order for his expeditions.

Because (der) the areas are all bits of sea, this means Connelly mostly visiting various islands, though sometimes he ticks off an area by crossing it on a boat or even flying over it. His adventures are gently entertaining, interspersed with pieces of history and geography, so the whole book is quite educational as well as amusing. It was a big hit in the UK, and it appears that Connelly has also turned it into a one man live show. I'm really glad he seems to have made a success out of the concept, it's so sweet and funny, but also occasionally poignant and even tragic. I enjoyed Attention All Shipping even more than I expected to.
 

Eleanor Jones Can't Keep a Secret

Eleanor Jones Can't Keep a Secret by Amy Doak is another from the CBCA Notables list, and one I really enjoyed. It's a sequel to Eleanor Jones Is Not a Murderer (great title!) and there is a third volume due soon, Eleanor Jones Is On Fire. It's a classic small town mystery, with Eleanor digging into a possible long-ago murder uncovered when a resident at the local aged care facility seems to be remembering something traumatic from her childhood.

I loved the way that Eleanor uses the library for her research, and also that she is such an avid reader, frequently referring to her latest book. Doak also skilfully interweaves an historic abusive relationship with Eleanor's uneasy interactions with a new acquaintance and shows how tempting it can be to slide into a potentially dangerous situation out of politeness. There's a strong message of friendship and accepting help from others -- something I gather carried over from the first book. There's a satisfying twist to the conclusion of the mystery, a nicely tense climax, and a gentle hint of (proper) romance. I would have been happy to see Eleanor Jones on the shortlist, it's a very accomplished and engaging novel.
 

Dinner at the Homesick Restaurant

I've read and enjoyed many Anne Tyler novels over the years, but somehow Dinner at the Homesick Restaurant, long time staple of high school readings lists, had passed me by. My husband was astonished when I said I'd never read it; it's one of the few books he'd read and I hadn't (not anymore, ha ha). This copy, which I found in a street library, was clearly a high school text -- it was almost destroyed with highlights, underlinings and graffiti in the margins, not to mention chewed and folded corners. I have to say this is by far the least attractive cover for this novel I've seen, too -- presumably this character is supposed to be scrappy tomboy Ruth, but this Ruth has a far too knowing smirk, when really she's a kind of innocent.

Dinner at the Homesick Restaurant is essentially a story of intergenerational trauma. It opens with Pearl Tull on her deathbed, reflecting on the amazing job she's done raising her three children alone after her husband Beck walked out on them. But we soon see, in flashbacks of the family history, that Pearl is a pretty terrible mother -- violent, abusive, volatile, prickly. Each of her three children carries the legacy of their childhood in a different way, but all are scarred to some degree, and we see that damage passed on in turn to their own children. I can see why it was such a popular set text -- mind you, my husband couldn't recall anything from his Year 11 study, so it didn'tmake that much of an impression.

In many ways, Dinner at the HS is the quintessential Tyler novel -- family dynamics, set in Baltimore, the passage of time, misunderstandings and wilful contradictions, but at the end of the day, the ties of family and shared history (even when it's experienced very differently between the players) create some kind of wavering, uncertain bond.
 

James

James is an utterly remarkable novel. Shortlisted for the Booker Prize and winner of the Pulitzer, it is both a deep literary conversation with an American classic (Huckleberry Finn) and an engaging, powerful story in its own right. In preparation for reading James (I had to wait months for it at the library), I read Huckleberry Finn -- well, most of it -- for the first time. While I appreciate that Mark Twain was trying to accomplish something new with this novel, and I acknowledge its place in the American canon, I didn't love the book. I found the dialect difficult to read, and much of the incident was frankly boring. I'm glad I didn't persist to the very end, after hearing the Secret Life of Books podcast describe the ending as really tedious!

James retells the events of Huckleberry Finn from the point of view of Huck's companion for much of his adventure, the escaped slave 'Jim'. The first and cleverest thing Everett does is have James and the other enslaved characters speak two languages: a slave patois when there are white people listening, and an articulate English when enslaved people are alone. This immediately recasts 'Jim' as highly intelligent. We also come to appreciate the intense, life-threatening danger of James' situation as an escapee. It's like a dark mirror image of the Huck Finn story, showing us everything that the first novel leaves out or only hints at.

There is a lot going on in James, but it's completely readable, fast-paced and totally engaging. I'm glad I read Huckleberry Finn first -- even the contrast in the first scene is stark, but telling. I also highly recommend the Secret Life of Books episodes on both Huck Finn and James, which were fascinating and enlightening. Coincidentally, I was reading Ta-Nehisi Coates' The Message at the same time as James, another thoughtful and ferocious Black author wrestling with America's racial past. Well worth the wait.

The Message

  

I can't remember where I heard about Ta-Nehisi Coates' The Message, but I assume it was in the context of thinking about Gaza. It's a short book, and it's a series of reflections rather than a tightly argued essay, but it is compelling and thoughtful reading. I wasn't aware of Coates notorious article, The Case for Reparations, in which he used the example of German reparations paid to Israel to bolster an argument for reparation payments to the descendants of enslaved people, a case study he later came to regret. This article hangs over the final section of The Message, a refreshing example of an author reconsidering and admitting he might have got something wrong.

The Message is divided into three parts. In the first, Coates visits Dakar for the first time, the fabled embarkation point for many slave ships travelling from Africa to America, and tries to make sense of his own sense of a mythic African past and his own cultural connection to the home of his ancestors. In the middle section, he attends a small town meeting where a white librarian leads a protest against the proposed banning of one of Coates' books, in the name of protecting white students from uncomfortable 'critical race theory,' and is heartened by the presence of so many white allies. It's so disturbing that this rewriting of history has only gathered pace. 

In the final, longest section, Coates visits Gaza and witnesses first hand the daily oppression of the Palestinian people at the hands of Israel, and tries to understand how the victims of the Holocaust can revisit a similar fate on another group of people. The Message was published in 2024, but written before the current war/genocide in Gaza, and it was very unsettling to read in this context. Coates paints a vivid picture of pre-war life in Gaza, which was bad enough; what has happened since is utterly horrific. He makes a number of comparisons between the treatment of Palestinians and the Jim Crow era oppression of Black people in the US. I felt I did gain a deeper understanding by reading The Message; highly recommended.

Unapologetic

Years ago I fell in love with Francis Spufford's memoir about childhood reading, The Child That Books Built, and I also loved his 2021 novel, Light Perpetual. But I was surprised to hear him talking about being a Christian on an ABC religion program on the radio, where they also mentioned a non-fiction book he'd written: Unapologetic: Why Despite Everything, Christianity Can Still Make Surprising Emotional Sense. The title appealed to me and I ordered it immediately (yes, I know, I'm not supposed to be buying books this year).

Weirdly, just as I'm writing this, there is another scientist on the radio talking about a possible gene for religiosity, or at least spirituality... I wouldn't be surprised. I've never felt comfortable with the Richard Dawkins school of militant atheism; it's not that I have any strong belief in God myself, but it's never sat right with me that anyone could so contemptuously dismiss a whole region of human experience. Whether or not there is anything there, clearly the feelings of faith and connection to something bigger are genuine, and need to be accounted for. This is more or less the position that Spufford takes -- he says quite plainly that he has the beliefs because he feels the emotions, not the other way around. Which seems to me a sensible position to take.

Spufford caused a bit of a stir with this book, partly because of the free use of swear words. Instead of 'sin,' he talks about humans' HPtFtU (High Propensity to F*** Things Up), which apparently offended a lot of Americans. Unapologetic is a fierce counter-argument to the Dawkins camp, retelling the story of Jesus in a fresh, unvarnished way, stripping it of the familiar, stale imagery and assumptions that inevitably cloud the reception of someone like me who went to a lot of Sunday School and attended a church school. Spufford is lively and punchy and fiesty, and he almost persuaded me. I still can't quite bring myself to make the leap all the way, but if I'm going to be sucked in, it will be through the emotions (looking at you, Elizabeth Goudge). But given how much Spufford loved the Narnia books as a child, perhaps I shouldn't be surprised at where he's ended up.
 

Raymie Nightingale & Louisiana's Way Home

 I found both these Kate DiCamillo books in a street library -- what a score! Unfortunately, the third volume of the trilogy, Beverly, Right Here wasn't with them, and I can't get it from the library either. It's only available on eBook, which is no good to me. However, Raymie Nightingale and Louisiana's Way Home were so good, I desperately want to read Beverly now, and I'm hoping I know someone who can lend it to me (hint, hint...)

These books are gorgeous, so poetic and easy to read, with very short chapters, sad and sweet and funny. Raymie is sensible and anxious, a rescuer; Louisiana is fey and scatty; Beverly is emphatic and bold. The three girls meet, improbably enough, at baton-twirling class at the age of ten, where Raymie is struggling with the abrupt departure of her father. Louisiana's story picks up two years later when her erratic grandmother whisks her into another state and then abandons her. I gather that Beverly's novel is set two years after that again, when the friends are 14, and this time it's Beverly herself who runs away? But perhaps I'll never know for sure.

The books are structured beautifully, with the stories twisting full circle and ending in optimism, despite the sometimes dark material they deal with. Highly recommended (love the cover art of these editions, too, it's so gentle and appealing). 

We Solve Murders

Predictably, given the popularity of Richard Osman's Thursday Murder Club series, there was a massive queue at the library for this new one. In We Solve Murders, Amy is a tough-as-guts bodyguard, looking out for Rosie D'Antonio, a best-selling celebrity author (think Joan Collins) and Steve is a retired policeman who happens to be Amy's father-in-law. The body count is very high, and so is the cast of colourful supporting characters, one of whom is trying to frame Amy for their murders. Cue a rollicking plot that involves a lot of cocktails, travel in private jets and international criminal intrigue -- perhaps this time Osman already has half an eye on the Netflix rights, and is planning to visit the sets?

The Thursday Murder Club has been an incredibly popular franchise. Even my friend who famously only reads one book a year raced through the whole lot without stopping (yes, I have friends who don't read). At first I did miss Ibrahim, Joyce, Elizabeth and Ron (I suspect Pierce Brosnan might be miscast, but we shall see), but I soon warmed to Steve and Amy and even Rosie, who might be a bit much in real life. Richard Osman has a knack for creating highly coloured, entertaining characters with a few words.

I think the Thursday Murder crew will remain my favourites, but I'm happy to meet some new friends and spend more time in their company. Roll on the sequels!

Sociopath

I heard Patric Gagne speaking on the radio one night and was intrigued by the sound of her memoir, Sociopath -- there was a very long wait on the library reserve list before I finally got my hands on it.

Honestly, Sociopath was a strange and unsettling read. At times it comes across almost like a novel, with reconstructed scenes and dialogues. Gagne makes the excellent point that there is a lot of grey around the diagnosis and even the definition of sociopathy. Is it the same as psychopathy, just further down the spectrum? The same test is used for assessment, but there is apparently a vast gulf between psychopathy and 'normal,' which is presumably where sociopathy sits. Gagne likes to define sociopathy as a kind of learning disability, but for emotions -- empathy, jealousy, compassion can be learned, but with difficulty (anger and happiness come more easily, at least for Gagne). 

Gane talks al lot about 'apathy,' which I found quite confusing -- sometimes it's good, sometimes unbearable. I must admit I became a bit lost at times as Gagne described her strategies for relieving the weight of apathy, though her descriptions of the rising tension, which could only be relieved by 'bad' actions (stealing a car, stabbing a classmate with a pencil), reminded me a lot of Gabor Matè's account of the unbearable tension of distress experienced by the drug users he works with. Whatever the origin of these impulses, it seems clear that the brain uses a similar mechanism to try to relieve its pain.

By the end of Sociopath, I can't claim that I understand sociopathy much better than I did, but I do have more sympathy for this maligned minority.
 

Ramona and Her Father

I was very happy to add Ramona and Her Father to my Beverly Cleary collection. I just love the Ramona stories, they have never lost their charm, and they are so much fun to read aloud. (My younger daughter has just reminded me that she loved Ramona and Beezus because they were sisters like her and her big sister, and that Ramona, Harry Potter and 101 Dalmatians were the only books they really shared.)

Cleary's stories are set firmly in the real world, and she doesn't shy away from real life problems. In Ramona and Her Father, Ramona's dad has lost his job and he's moping round the house, getting depressed because his job hunt is unsuccessful, and being quite grumpy. Ramona's mum has to start working full time to make up for the loss in income, and money is tight. None of this is Ramona's problem to solve, but it's always there in the background. I loved the sisters' campaign to stop their father smoking, and Ramona's humiliatingly half-hearted sheep costume for the end of year Nativity play (because Mum doesn't have time to sew a full suit -- hm...)

One thing that reliably makes Ramona feel better is making a ruckus, and there is a wonderful chapter where she and her friend Howie clomp around on tin can stilts, singing at the tops of their lungs. Unbearable for everyone else, but fantastic for Ramona. 

I am fully confident that if/when I have grandchildren, they will love Ramona as much as we all do.

Amy Amaryllis

The silver lining to being felled by this terrible lurgy that's going around is that it's opened up hours of guilt-free reading time, and I have been racing through my Too Be Read pile. I spotted Amy Amaryllis on Brotherhood Books and couldn't resist its cute premise. Amy, an ordinary suburban Australian girl, begins to write a story in her green book, a story about Amaryllis from magical Ankoor, who lives in a castle amid the crags where reinbeast roam... Meanwhile, Amaryllis, in her own world, begins to write the story of Amy, a girl with freedom to explore and few duties to perform. Inevitably, the girls swap places and have to deal with each other's problems in very different realities, as well as figure out how to return home.

Apparently Amy Amaryllis is the first in a 'loosely linked' series, which from the titles, seems to be set in Ankoor. I think I might have come across Candle Iron in the past, but haven't read it; I might have to remedy that. I did enjoy Amy Amaryllis a lot, but it's weird how a book written in the 1990s has dated more obviously in some ways than some written in earlier decades. They always warn you that nothing dates a book more quickly than slang, and Amy and her brother's exclamations of 'Grossisimo!' and 'Blastissimo!' (not sure that was ever genuine slang, actually) did grate slightly after a while. But despite that quibble, this was a very enjoyable world-swap story and one I would have adored as a kid. It's like Charlotte Sometimes, but with more action and humour, rather than Charlotte's eerie solemnity.

A Fence Around the Cuckoo

Ruth Park's two volume autobiography, A Fence Around the Cuckoo and Fishing in the Styx, has been on my radar for a while -- as with any very popular books, they keep popping up on Brotherhood Books. Is Ruth Park an under-rated author? Unusually, she was extremely successful in three strands of fiction. Her children's books about The Muddleheaded Wombat were huge favourites of my kids (though I never read them myself as a child); her young adult book, Playing Beatie Bow, was possibly the seminal Australian time slip story; and I studied at least one of her adult novels, Poor Man's Orange, in Year 9 at high school (I wonder why they didn't choose the first book about the Darcy family, A Harp in the South? The prequel, Missus, wasn't published until after I'd left school.)

Anyway, to those achievements we can add autobiography, because A Fence Around the Cuckoo is a tremendous piece of writing. It covers Park's childhood in the New Zealand bush, her family's struggles during the Great Depression, and her first jobs in journalism before she emigrated to Australia in 1942. From Park's account, the Depression hit New Zealand slightly less hard than it hit Australia, but it hit hard all the same. It was sobering to read about the same era as Weevils in the Flour from the perspective of one family. The Depression must have left psychological wounds just as deep as the two wars, at least on the poor, and yet it's rarely discussed -- I guess it was less dramatic.

A Fence Around the Cuckoo ends with Park's arrival in Australia, greeted by her pen friend D'arcy Niland, who was to become her husband. I gather Fishing in the Styx picks up where this volume leaves off, and I cannot wait to read it.

The Explorer

I found Katherine Rundell's 2017 The Explorer in a street library -- prize winning and acclaimed, it's a classic, timeless adventure story of four children whose plane crashes in the middle of the Amazon. The first part of the book is like Alone, as the kids find ways to survive in the jungle, but for me the story took off about halfway through, when they encounter another person who arrived in the wilderness long before they did.

The Explorer is packed with action, but it's also thoughtful about what 'exploring' means -- not just the thrill of discovery, but also dispossession, exploitation and destruction, and the battle between those competing interests. It's also a story about friendship and family. I liked the way that Fred's motivation to explore was nuanced: he is genuinely excited about uncovering 'new' places, but he's also desperate for his father's approval and love, and he would kind of like to be famous, too...

Coincidentally, this is the second children's book in short order that I've read set in the Amazon. When the children in The Explorer finally head for home, they are instructed to navigate using the Opera House in Manaus which was such a huge part of the story in A Company of Swans (which I had to google to check if it was real, it sounded so unlikely). The Explorer is hugely enjoyable and I'm not surprised it was such a hit with young readers.
 

Everyone This Christmas Has a Secret

Not a full length novel this time; Benjamin Stevenson himself calls this a Christmas special, a nice slim stocking filler which still hits all those fun, knowing Ernest Cunningham marks. This time Ern is called to assist his ex-wife Erin, who has woken up covered in blood and with the murdered corpse of her partner downstairs. She doesn't think she did it, Ern doesn't think she did it, but can he prove it? 

Stevenson structures Everyone This Christmas Has a Secret like an advent calendar, with each 'door' comprising one short chapter, each containing a clue to the solution -- he even helpfully tells us what the clues are, though not exactly what their significance might be. I raced through Christmas and was proud of myself for figuring out one element of the mystery before I was told (I'm not very good at solving mysteries). It was a nice change to read a Christmas story set in an Australian (ie sweltering) Christmas; this time the setting is the Blue Mountains.

Weirdly I finished Christmas exactly a year to the day after finishing Stevenson's last novel; I hope he's working on something new because these books are so much fun.
 

The Morning Gift

Wow, I have certainly done a massive binge on Eva Ibbotson -- I reserved all the available titles from the local library and I've been reading them as they come in. The Morning Gift was the last one, though I have also bought a couple of books and added them to my pile. I might take a rest for a while. The good thing about Eva Ibbotson is that you know exactly what you're going to get. Our sweet, funny heroine this time is Ruth, a refugee from Vienna at the beginning of the Second World War. Our reserved, masterful older man is Quin Somerville, professor and paleontologist. This time, the plot starter is that Quin secretly marries Ruth in order to extract her safely from Austria. There are, as usual, complications galore, mostly in the shape of classical pianist Heini, to whom Ruth is officially devoted, and ruthless student (ha ha) Verena Plackett, who has set her marital sights on Quin.

One thing I love about Ibbotson novels, apart from their comforting reliability, is the large cast of eccentric characters that she manages to so deftly create and move around the chess board of the story. Though our hero and heroine tend to be very similar characters from novel to novel, our minor characters are delightfully varied and vividly sketched in such an endearing way that we can't help becoming invested in their fates. In The Morning Gift, we meet passionate gardener Uncle Mishak, horrible snob Lady Plackett, free spirit Janet, floundering biology student Pilly, and many others.

I seem to be declaring each Ibbotson my favourite as I make my way through them, but I really think  The Morning Gift (named for the symbolic gift that defines a morganatic marriage, freeing the husband from any future marital obligations -- I always wondered where that came from) might be my actual favourite!

Naarm/Melbourne Neighbourhoods

Naarm/Melbourne Neighbourhoods was a Mother's Day present from my elder child: probably not something I would have bought for myself, but it's a fun and useful book. The cover is very misleading, because the suburbs labelled there are definitely not in the correct geographical positions! But inside it's divided into City, East, South, North etc, with bite sized paragraphs about historical anecdotes, interesting buildings, urban myths, significant persons, landmarks and festivals. I've lived in Naarm almost all my life but I still learned some weird and wonderful facts, like Prahran probably being a corruption of Birrarung (the Yarra's proper name), and that Bertie Beetles were first invented to use up broken bits of Violet Crumble.

Each section includes a suggested walk around the chosen area, which look like a lot of fun, and something I'd really like to do one day. This book would be an excellent present (or loan) to a visitor to the city, but it's also got lots to offer even to long-time residents.
 

The Leopard

I don't know what happened to my original copy of The Leopard, which I studied in HSC a looong time ago, but I replaced it some time ago with the one pictured above. I was prompted to re-read Guiseppe di Lampedusa's 1958 classic novel partly by Susan Green, and partly by watching the sumptuous Netflix series based on the book.

Watching the series, I marvelled that I'd forgotten so much of the story -- well, it's not that surprising, because the script writer fleshed out some episodes with invented scenes. But in fact there was quite a bit that I'd genuinely forgotten. I remember how much I adored The Leopard, but what I mostly retained was the atmosphere of languid, lush sensuality, mingled violence and torpor that gave me my first impression of Sicily. My most vivid recollection, skimmed over in the adaptation, was of young lovers Tancredi and Angelica exploring the long-neglected corners of the family's immense villa, trembling on the dangerous edge of desire but never quite giving in -- it was the sexiest thing I'd ever read!

Now I'm old and grey, it's Prince Fabrizio's musings on aging and regret that speak to me most powerfully. There really isn't much plot in The Leopard, but it's still amazingly atmospheric, and the Netflix version succeeded in bringing that atmosphere to life; also, Kim Rossi Stuart is superb as the Prince. At seventeen, I had a huge crush on Tancredi, but now I find him merely irritating. The Leopard was well worth a re-visit.
 

In the Realm of Hungry Ghosts

Going back over some familiar ground here -- this is the third of Gabor Maté's books I've read, and I've come to greatly respect his insights. In the Realm of Hungry Ghosts deals specifically with addiction. Maté has worked for many years among drug addicts in one of Canada's most deprived urban areas; he also (somewhat controversially) counts himself as an addict, though his personal addiction is not to a legal or illegal drug, but rather to overwork and to the compulsive purchase of classical music CDs.

There is some overlap between this book and Maté's previous work on ADHD -- many addicts are trying to soothe their restless minds with the help of illicit substances (as well as traditional drugs like alcohol and nicotine) -- but his central point is that all addicts are fundamentally seeking to calm minds disordered by trauma. Sometimes this trauma might be inter-generational oppression, or childhood sexual abuse, but it might be a deep inner disconnection caused by loving but distracted parenting -- anything that prevented the parent from closely bonding with their infant. Maté admits that he himself has often been a less than perfect parent, and that though his own parents were loving, he was born into the profound misery and dislocation of war, and was fostered out as a baby for his own safety.

The most moving sections of this long and scholarly book are the personal stories of the addicts with whom Maté has worked. Often difficult to deal with, unreliable, violent and bitter, Maté brings us close to their pain and their longing for connection. Maté's work makes a mockery of the simplistic solutions often proposed for dealing with drug addiction, or indeed for troubled youth or dispossessed minorities, or any number of 'problem' populations. Maté's compassion and reflection should be essential reading.