The Blessing

I found this omnibus edition of three of Nancy Mitford's novels in a secondhand book shop. I already own a very well-thumbed copy of The Pursuit of Love and Love in a Cold Climate so I just bought this for The Blessing, which oddly I have never owned and I don't think I've read it since high school (a long time, anyway!)

The Blessing, while not reaching the comedic heights and poignant depths of the other two novels, stood up very well, though I expect I would have got more out of it if I knew more about French high society in the 1950s. Womanising Charles-Edouard is of course yet another portrait of Gaston Palewski, this time elevated to a dukedom and terrifically handsome. Despite being married to beautiful, languid, easy-going Englishwoman Grace, he can't keep his eyes or hands off other women; the central cultural conflict of the novel lies between the worldly, sophisticated French attitude to these affairs, and the uptight priggish English intolerance of such behaviour.

All through the story, Grace is urged to adopt a kind of radical acceptance of Charles-Edouard's roving eye, even when she catches him in flagrante. It occurs to me that Charles-Edouard could equally have exercised some radical self-control, but hey. The real villain of the piece is the couple's young son Sigi, who shamelessly manipulates them both to keep them apart and enjoy the fruits of their undivided attention. I have no idea what the contemporary attitude to extra-martial affairs is in France these days, but I suspect it might be a little less forgiving that it was in 1951. 

A Matter of Death and Life

A Matter of Death and Life is a beautiful, sad book. When Marilyn Yalom, married to author and psychotherapist Irvin Yalom and an accomplished academic and writer in her own right, was diagnosed with terminal cancer, she suggested that she and Irv should write a book about their experience together. In the first two thirds of the book, they write alternating chapters, charting Marilyn's treatment, her acceptance that the end is near and her wish to take control of the process, along with Irv's panicked denials and terror at the thought of losing her. The last few chapters are written by Irv alone, grieving, observing himself, missing her so much he can't bear to look at her photograph. At 88, he is sure that it won't be long before he dies, too -- but, incredibly, as I write this, he is now 94 and remarried!

There are many interesting, heart wrenching observations: Irvin is shocked that he's besieged with obsessive thoughts of sex after Marilyn's death; he knows perfectly well intellectually that she is dead, but he can't help taking photos and storing up anecdotes to tell her (apparently this reflects different functions of the memory in the brain); he acknowledges for the first time that he has never really known loss before, and that his therapy clients who accused him of being smug and insulated in his own happiness were quite correct.

Marilyn quotes a beautiful poem that I hadn't come across before, by Jane Kenyon, who herself died tragically young.

Let the fox go back to its sandy den.
Let the wind die down. Let the shed
go black inside. Let evening come.

To the bottle in the ditch, to the scoop
in the oats, to air in the lung
let evening come.

Let it come, as it will, and don’t
be afraid. God does not leave us
comfortless, so let evening come.

 

Silver

Fittingly, I read most of Chris Hammer's second novel, Silver, in a seaside town, though one located on the Mornington Peninsula near Melbourne rather than the north coast of New South Wales like the fictional town of Port Silver. Silver takes place in the months after Scrublands; journalist Martin Scarsden has finished his true crime book (don't we all wish we could bang out a whole book in a month or so?) and is joining new partner Mandy and her baby son Liam in his old hometown where she's inherited a house. Overlook the coincidence -- there are more to come.

Silver is a well-constructed mystery with the now familiar Hammer ingredients of shenanigans around real estate, buried secrets and unsuspected connections. I really enjoyed the sections where Martin is schlepping around with Liam; we don't often see investigations carried out with a toddler in tow, and the detective having to worry about nappies and baby food (conveniently, Liam falls asleep in the car a lot). Martin's own traumatic family past is fleshed out for the first time, and we meet his uncle Vern and his Aboriginal wife. The pace is less frenetic than in Scrublands, but there's plenty of action -- a corpse in the first few pages, several historic violent deaths, a fist fight on the beach, and a mass poisoning before the novel's end. Martin often acts like a dick, despite his bonding with Liam (luckily there is private childcare available whenever it's not possible for either Mandy or Martin to look after him), and Mandy gets realistically fed up with him.

Silver forms the basis of the second season of Scrublands, available on streaming, and now I've polished off the book I can't wait to get stuck into the TV version. If it's anything like Scrublands season one, it will simplify the plot considerably and delete a few storylines to compress it into four episodes instead of 560 pages. 

Cuckoo's Flight

Cuckoo's Flight is the third and final volume in Wendy Orr's Bronze Age trilogy, and Leira from Swallow's Dance makes a reappearance as Clio's grandmother. This time the town is in danger from raiders, and it seems that one of the young girls will be chosen as a sacrifice to appease the Goddess. Clio's family are potters, but Clio's true love is her father's horses. After an accident that damaged her leg, Clio will never ride again; but her father has an idea for a chariot that might be almost as good...

Orr wrote Cuckoo's Flight during Covid lockdowns, and she says she realised while she was writing it that Clio was going to be disabled, as she herself is now. Female family relationships and friendships are strongly emphasised in this book, like the other Bronze Age stories, and it's so refreshing to read a novel set in a matriarchal society (even if the Lady and the Goddess are sometimes unreasonable in their demands). Life is harsh in these times, with orphaned Mika being beaten by her brother, ill-treated slaves in the purple dye works, and brutal battles; but there is kindness and rejoicing, too.

Cuckoo's Flight was the last book I rescued from the Allen & Unwin clearout, and I'm happy to have all three volumes of the trilogy safe on my own shelves -- it would be worth it for the covers alone, created by the brilliant Josh Durham who was also responsible for the cover design of Crow Country.
 

This Is the Story of a Happy Marriage

This is the Story of a Happy Marriage was a recommendation from my book group friend Kirsty; it's a non-fiction collection of essays and articles by Ann Patchett, and I think I enjoyed it even more than Bel Canto. 

The essays about applying to join the Los Angeles Police Force in the wake of the Rodney King riots, and the long history of her relationship to her now-husband were hugely engaging; each was a complicated story. Patchett's father was an LAPD police officer, and while she did want to explore what kinds of people applied to join, she also wanted to acknowledge the difficulties of the work and honour her father (he was really keen for her to actually join, not just write about it). The marriage story is actually largely about divorce, but it has a gorgeously happy ending. The final story, about her friendship with an elderly nun who used to be her primary school teacher, was beautiful and moving.

I did find the essays about caring for her elderly grandmother and the death of her beloved dog were a bit close to the bone for me at the moment, which is another way of recognising their power and truth. The only essay I didn't particularly enjoy was the one about writing. Patchett's advice is blunt and robust, basically just get on with it -- which I know is true -- I just don't much feel like hearing it!
 

Journey to the River Sea

Journey to the River Sea must be about the last of Eva Ibbotson's books for older readers, and I've been saving it up. It's her most awarded novel, and in many ways it distils all that we love best about her work. Maia is the brave, kind heroine; orphaned Finn is the exotic young love interest; Miss Minton is the stern but loving guardian; the horrid, selfish Carters are unmitigated villains. We are transported to the Amazon in 1910, one of Ibbotson's favourite settings, and again we learn that what makes life worth living is nature, music, kindness, curiosity and books, a message that never gets tired.

I'm glad that of all Ibbotson's books, Journey to the River Sea is one that I decided to buy; it really is one of her best.
 

Daydreamers Anonymous

I was so desperate to read this novel that I broke my strict no-purchases-through-Amazon rule -- it was literally the only way I could access it. Samantha Rose Parker has published (I suspect self-published?) Daydreamers Anonymous, the story of Clara, who is thirty five and a compulsive daydreamer. Stuck in a boring office job, living in a basement room in an unsatisfactory share house, Clara's real life unspools inside her head. But she knows she can't go on like this, and she joins a support group, led by the charismatic Dr Hill, who claims to have cured himself. As the back cover blurb says, Clara 'meets her people, but she's not exactly sure she wants them to be her people: there's Jax, who lives a double life as a detective; Bob, who has an invisible family, and Janice, who's been married to Tom Cruise in her head for 30 years...'

Confession time: all through my teens I was a compulsive daydreamer, just like Clara. There's one character in Clara's support group who fantasises herself as 'Dr Who's assistant,' which is pretty close to the content of my own parallel life. It's not going too far to call this kind of daydreaming an addiction. Whenever I  had the chance, I'd slip into my inner narrative, assuming an alter ego who was smarter, prettier, braver and more lovable than me. I had one friend at school who also had an active fantasy life; she's the only person (apart from one therapist) with whom I've ever discussed what my friend and I dubbed 'etcetera.' Like Clara, I genuinely felt that my secret life was my true life and the most important thing about me; the outer me was just going through the motions. And like Clara, I realised that this was a dangerous path. When started uni, I tried to give up cold turkey -- it was the hardest thing I've ever done, and it took a long time to shake the addiction. I've relapsed from time to time, but I seem to have lost the urge, maybe even the ability, to lose myself in daydreams like I used to. And I'm honestly kind of sad about that. I could easily have ended up like Clara, and I'm glad I avoided that fate, but there's a loss and grief there too.

Daydreamers Anonymous obviously had a special resonance for me, but it's a funny, moving, poignant novel in its own right, with no easy answers for what is a genuine psychological problem. 

The Twelve

UK writer Liz Hyder's YA novel, The Twelve, was recommended by my book group friend, Cathy, who guessed correctly that it would be right up my alley. The blurbs all over the cover talk about Alan Garner and Susan Cooper, which is a signal to parents of my generation rather than a recommendation to young readers themselves these days, I would think. The Twelve certainly has strong echoes of both authors, but notably it's written in a much more modern style -- present tense, first person narration, without which apparently no contemporary young person will pick up a book (what a fuddy duddy I sound like...)

Kit is about fifteen, staying in a caravan over Christmas with her eleven year old sister Libby and her mother. The Christmas timing and the twelve mysterious Watchers harks back to Susan Cooper's The Dark is Rising, and there are shades of early Alan Garner in Kit and her new friend Story's pursuit of the vanished Libby into the distant past and their battle against a dark enemy. There are lovely invocations of the teeming wildlife in the largely unpeopled historic times that Kit and Story visit: birds, insects, fish and mammals everywhere (I should add the novel is itself set in historic times, in 1999, though I have trouble thinking of a mere twenty five years ago as being historical fiction!)

I really enjoyed The Twelve, and I hope young readers thirsty for fantastical novels strong on landscape and character will relish it as much as I did.

Becoming Myself

I've long been a fan of American psychotherapist Irvin Yalom, especially his two wise books about coming to term with death, Creatures of a Day and Staring at the Sun. In Becoming Myself, Yalom recounts his life story, and it's just as insightful, compassionate and insightful as his writing about his therapy clients (I haven't yet read Yalom's long fiction, but Becoming Myself has piqued my curiosity).

In many ways, and he admits this himself, Yalom has had a blessed life. He married his soul mate, Marilyn, early, they have four healthy children, he has taught and written and seen clients for many decades, he has travelled all over the world and spoken to huge and adoring audiences, and espeically in latter years, he has enjoyed enormous acclaim and popularity. At the time of writing Becoming Myself, he was 86; he's now 94 and still with us.

Yalom is cheerfully candid about his own luck and his failings and regrets -- he allowed Marilyn to shoulder the bulk of child rearing, though she's had a demanding academic career of her own; he made mistakes in handling some patients; he wishes he'd had more empathy toward his difficult mother. He freely discusses taking marijuana, opium, LSD and ecstasy, which didn't shock but did surprise me. He is such an engaging writer and so open about his experiences, Becoming Myself was a thoroughly enjoyable read. Next I'm going to read A Matter of Death and Life, written a few years later by Irvin and Marilyn together, after Marilyn's diagnosis of terminal cancer. Yalom is frank about his fear of losing Marilyn, and I wonder how they handled it together.

The Names

I think I first heard about Florence Knapp's debut novel, The Names, on The Bookshelf on Radio National, and I was immediately hooked by the premise. In 1987, Cora is taking her newborn son to register his name, and on the way she tosses up between three alternatives -- Gordon, the name of her overbearing husband; Julian, her own preference; or Bear, the choice of her young daughter, Maia. The narrative then splits into three strands, each following the the consequences of a different naming decision.

I already have a weakness for names, and I love alternate timelines, so this was an instant must-read for me. I had to wait for months until my reservation came up at the library, and there are 144 people waiting behind me (they have to wait a little longer, as my daughter is currently reading it, and she doesn't normally read fiction, which again testifies to the appeal of this novel). The Names is a hugely readable and engaging story which nonetheless explores some big questions about fate and destiny, family violence, the power of small decisions, loyalty and money and power. The Names is a wonderful example of strong domestic fiction -- it deals relationships within one small family, but it spirals out to encompass a wider field thanks to the three parallel storylines. I did read one review by a person who apparently launched into the book without realising what was happening with the structure and was initially bewildered, but I honestly can't believe they could have been confused for long.

I whipped through The Names in a weekend and it would be a terrific recommendation for reluctant (adult!) readers.

EDIT: My daughter absolutely loved it and can't wait for the inevitable movie.
 

Secret Sparrow

There seems to be no end to the stories to be found in the history of WWI, even though it ended over a century ago. In Secret Sparrow, Jackie French has uncovered a largely forgotten cohort of women Morse code signallers who were recruited after many of the male Post Office employees had been killed early in the fighting. According to French, the service records of these women were destroyed after the war so that the government wouldn't have to pay them pensions, which sadly sounds  all too plausible! However, it seems their status was always ambiguous: they remained Post Office employees, despite wearing uniforms and having to obey Army orders.

Secret Sparrow is the story of Jean McLain, who recounts her wartime experience to young Arjun during a long night when they're stranded by a flash flood (this part of the story takes place in 1978). It's a cracking tale, full of action and peril -- Jean's transport ship is blown up, she is frequently under fire, eventually she's sent right to the front line and endures ten days of terror and excitement during a big forward push. There's even a bit of romance. There are a few moments of contrivance, but I'll forgive them in the service of the story (even 1978 seems a little early to be talking about Bletchley, but what would I know). I'm always up for a wartime tale and Secret Sparrow is a good one.

The Horror of Love

How could I resist a wonderful title like The Horror of Love, especially when it deals with my favourite Mitford sister, Nancy? Lisa Hilton's 2011 book deals with the long love affair between Nancy and her 'Colonel,' Gaston Palewski, better known to readers of The Pursuit of Love as Fabrice de Sauveterre, a portrait in which Palewski delighted.

Hilton takes the refreshing view that Nancy was not the humiliated, put-upon victim of Gaston's negligence; rather, she argues that theirs was a very adult, very French relationship, and that the fact that Palewski had many liaisons and ended up marrying someone else never altered their essential bond. She notes that Palewski invited Nancy to stay with him every summer while he was posted in Rome, they never lost contact, and I've always found it incredibly touching that he had a premonition to rush to her bedside and hold her hand just before she died.

I'm not sure that I entirely buy this very stiff-upper-lip attitude, but personally I do believe that Nancy made a conscious decision that a bit of the Colonel was better than none at all, and played her cards accordingly. Hilton is scrupulous in devoting equal time to her two protagonists, which means there is a LOT of French politics in this book; conversely, I didn't learn anything about Nancy that I didn't already know from previous biographies and letters, and surely no one is going to pick up The Horror of Love unless they are already a huge Mitford fan? Perhaps there are Palewski fans out there, but I seriously doubt it.
 

Vintage Murder

  

I thought it was about time I sampled one of the Queens of Crime whose books I've never read. Encouraged by the Secret Life of Books podcast, I started with Ngaio Marsh's Vintage Murder, which is actually her fifth book about Detective-Inspector Roderick Alleyn. Though Alleyn is based in London, in Vintage Murder, he is on holidays on New Zealand (given the book was published in 1937, that is quite a commitment for a holiday -- about six weeks' sea voyage each way!) Marsh was herself a New Zealander and this was the first time she'd ventured 'home' in fiction.

Ngaio Marsh seems to belong firmly to the puzzle school of murder mystery authors, with the solution turning on entrances and exits and who in the large cast of suspects had the opportunity to access the scene of the crime. The reader can compare each character's account of events on the crucial night and spot the discrepancies, just like a real detective. However, to me, this is the least interesting aspect of the story. I enjoyed Marsh's observations about New Zealand, its incredible scenery and the locals' colonial deference to the Scotland Yard expert. The Maori character of Dr Te Pokiha is mostly sensitively drawn, though there are a couple of moments of wince-inducing racism.

I think I will try another Marsh, mostly for the period detail, but I did enjoy Vintage Murder, even if the mystery itself was on the humdrum side. The murder, however, was truly spectacular, involving a jereboam of champagne smashing down on the victim's head.

The Unwanteds

  

Another disappointing book, I'm afraid. Again, I don't think my opinion will hurt Lisa McMann, because The Unwanteds is a New York Times bestselling series of seven volumes and is evidently extremely popular! I borrowed it because I liked the premise: in the land of Quill, creative children are designated 'Unwanted' and 'purged' at the age of thirteen. However, instead of being chucked into a lake of boiling oil as they anticipate, they find themselves transported into a magical, colourful land where they can refine and explore their creative skills in safety. But a showdown is coming...

The Unwanteds is aimed at readers of 8-14, but that doesn't excuse the broad brush plot strokes, the liberal use of adverbs at every opportunity, and the thin characters. The cover blurb describes the series as 'The Hunger Games meets Harry Potter,' which is a stunning elevator pitch, and was no doubt irresistible to publishing executives. But unfortunately, for me, The Unwanteds never progresses far beyond the formulaic.  

The Women

I should start by saying that a lot of people really love this novel. The Women by Kristin Hannah has over a million 5 star reviews on Goodreads, and it came in high on the Radio National book countdown -- particularly since it hasn't benefited from a film or TV adaptation. It deals with meaty, emotional subject matter -- the experience of American women, specifically nurses, during the Vietnam War, women who suffered physically and psychologically and yet had their experiences dismissed and were frequently told 'there were no women in Vietnam.'

Having pointed out all that, I have to admit this book was not for me. I found it melodramatic, often implausible, and not very well written. There was a lot of telling, not showing, in this novel. Frankie's close friendship with her fellow nurses, Barb and Ethel, seemed very one-sided -- several times, Barb and Ethel drop everything to fly across the country and support Frankie in her many crises, yet Frankie never seems to offer them any support in return. We are told how strong and important their friendship is, but we don't really see it. Frankie's mother has a stroke, from which she makes a full recovery -- this serves no purpose except to fill up a few years of plot time. Every man that Frankie meets falls in love with her. I can handle one character miraculously coming back from the dead, but two strains credulity.

I can see that the strong, eventful story would pull readers rapidly through this novel, and I thought the early sections, dealing with Frankie's war experiences, were vivid and punchy, but for me, after she returned home, the story trailed away. I wish Kristin Hannah all the best and clearly many, many readers adore her work -- and The Women is indeed a story that deserves to be told. This just isn't the version for me.
 

The Golden Road

I'm a big fan of William Dalrymple and Anita Anand's podcast, Empire, but I've never read any of William Dalrymple's history books before. The Golden Road explores the influence of ancient Indian culture on the world -- Buddhism and Hinduism spread both east and west, as far as China, and had a huge influence on the Arab world, while so-called 'Arabic' numerals and especially the concept of zero were actually Indian in origin.

Dalrymple writes in a clear and engaging style, and has an eye for the lively anecdote that keeps the narrative moving. But to my shame, my complete ignorance of world history outside Europe often left me feeling out of my depth, paddling helplessly in a sea of names and dates and places that were unfamiliar to me. I'm not sure I'll remember a lot of what I read in The Golden Road, but hopefully it might have laid down a foundation for learning in the future.

Scrublands

I've discovered that the library at my dad's aged care home contains almost a full shelf of Chris Hammer novels! So I started out with the first book, Scrublands, where it all began.

In some ways, Scrublands bears the hallmarks of a first novel -- there is almost too much going on, as if Hammer wanted to cram in every fiction idea he ever had. In the first hundred pages we have a mass shooting, a kidnapping in Gaza, a fatal car crash and a bushfire -- and that's just the start of the action. Martin Scarsdale, a journalist battling PTSD, is an attractive protagonist, though for someone who characterises himself as a detached observer, he doesn't hold back on getting involved in the dramas of the damaged little outback town of Riversend. Mandalay Blonde unfortunately has the name of a Bond girl, but she's also an attractive (maybe too attractive) love interest for Martin.

There is a lot going on in Scrublands and over nearly 500 pages, Hammer doesn't hold back. In contrast, The Seven had a more measured pace and arguably more depth to the story. Hammer seems to have calmed down a bit between book one and book ten (I think). I'm interested to check out the mini-series and see how closely it hews to the novel.

Yellow Notebook

It's hard to believe that six years have passed since the publication of Helen Garner's first volume of diaries, Yellow Notebook. It came out before Covid! In some ways that feels like another lifetime, but in some ways it seems like the blink of an eye.

It was an interesting experience to go back and reread Yellow Notebook, knowing what's coming in volumes 2 and 3. This book covers the years from 1978, just after Monkey Grip, to 1987, when she's poised on the brink of her third marriage to 'V.' When V first appears in the last sections of the diary, you feel like yelling, 'No, Helen! Don't do it!' In spite of her attraction to him, we can already see V's fatal rigidity, his self-centred intellectualism, his insistence on his own point of view, all of which are going to capsize their future relationship.

Some of my favourite parts of Yellow Notebook deal with Garner wrestling with what she calls 'the mighty force,' which is some sense of the numinous or spiritual, which she almost seems to experience as a wild beast stalking her, waiting to pounce. At this stage she seems determined not to surrender to it.

I'm so happy that these diaries have begun to draw attention from overseas readers; at long last, Garner is getting the acclaim that she's always deserved.
 

Untwisted

Coincidentally, not long before I spotted Paul Jenning's Untwisted: The Story of My Life on the Allen & Unwin shelves (wow, I really did score, didn't I), it was recommended by my friend Kirsty Murray. It's a fabulous read, a candid, funny and often moving account of Jennings' background and career.

Paul Jennings didn't start writing for children until he was forty years old. Before then, he had an extraordinary career as a teacher and education lecturer, often taking on students with physical or mental difficulties, and teaching youth offenders at what was then called Turana. With his quirky, hilarious short stories and particularly after the huge success of the ABC kids' show, Round the Twist, Jennings found himself rich and famous, and able to indulge himself by buying lots of vintage cars and fairytale cottages in the mountains. However, he is equally frank about his own struggles with mental health and the toll that his ups and downs took on his relationships.

Untwisted is compulsively readable. Jennings is a master craftsman of the art of the plot twist, foreshadowing and the clever set-up, and this makes the story of his own life a real page-turner. I must admit that his stories never had a lot of appeal for me, but my kids loved them, and Round the Twist is of course a classic. I now have a fresh respect and admiration for this national treasure of Australian children's literature. 

Crampton Hodnet

Finally published in 1980 after Barbara Pym's career revival, Crampton Hodnet was actually written in the 1930s and put aside because of the war. I think it was Pym's very first novel, and it contains all the classic Pym ingredients -- spinsters and widows, busy with good works, clergymen, foolish academics and young women who are way too good for them. It's set in North Oxford, which I'm acquainted with through Penelope Lively's The House in Norham Gardens, where much is made of the tall dark brooding house. The house where Miss Doggett and Jessie Morrow live is described as 'ugly,' and from the cover, it's definitely the same kind of house!

What I especially love about Barbara Pym is that, at the end of the day, nothing much actually happens. Even grand schemes of elopement fizzle out; people somehow find themselves embroiled in love affairs without actually feeling that keen; misunderstandings abound; proposals of marriage are made and dismissed almost in the same breath. If Quartet in Autumn was melancholic, Crampton Hodnet is bursting with low-key joy. It's very funny and I laughed out loud a couple of times, whereas Pym's novels usually provoke a wry smile.

Wolf on the Fold

 

Wolf on the Fold by Judith Clarke was another pick-up from the Allen & Unwin clearout. I only discovered Judith Clarke's writing a few years ago, but she was a deeply admired and prize-winning author. Wolf on the Fold won the CBCA Book of the Year in 2001, just as I was starting out on my own publication journey. It's not really a novel, but a set of short stories linking generations of one family, from 1935 to 2002. Characters weave in and out; sometimes the family members are not even the centre of the story, but just appears on the margins.

Wolf on the Fold is a beautiful and sad book, and beautifully written, but I doubt very much if any young adult reader would pick it up today. It mixes history and politics, but seen through the lens of the personal, and brings into sharp focus the idea of 'family stories,' those well-polished anecdotes that every family has, sometimes only one or two lines, that ends up defining an ancestor or a generation forever in the family memory. One of the stories is set in Jerusalem, around the time of the Gulf War, which was a shocking reminder of the ceaseless history of bloodshed in that region.

All the children in these stories are confronted with the harshness of the adult world, whether in the form of poverty, war, murderous intent, racism, or institutional cruelty, and they each find their own way of dealing with it. I suppose each story is a stepping stone toward maturity. Because of this, I think Wolf on the Fold works better as a reflective adult book than as a YA novel.

 

In My Time of Dying

Those of you who have been following my reading journey will realise that there is no way I could ignore a book with this title. In My Time of Dying: How I Came Face to Face with the Idea of an Afterlife is not written by a would-be medium or someone claiming psychic powers or the ability to commune with spirits. Sebastian Junger is a hard-nosed journalist, a war correspondent, who has had many encounters with death and near-death, his own and other people's. But the incident that inspired this book was a medical emergency, an abdominal aneurysm that very nearly killed him.

During the moments when Junger was hovering on the border between life and death, he saw something totally unexpected: his dead father, who was a rational, logical scientist and if anything even more hard-nosed than his son. Junger's blow-by-blow account of his medical experience is utterly gripping, and takes up the first half of the book. The second half is devoted to his struggle to understand why he might have seen his father, and takes him into the arcane reaches of quantum theory, the definition of consciousness, and others' accounts of their own near-death experiences, to conclude that perhaps consciousness is woven into the very fabric of the universe, and that we really do rejoin something larger than ourselves when we die. It's a controversial, but (to me) very appealing proposition. I'm certain there is more to reality than our puny brains can comprehend, and it's always seemed the height of arrogance to assume that we could.

Weirdly, just after reading In My Time of Dying, I read Paul Jennings' life story, Untwisted, in which he recounts his own near-death experience, when he saw a cavern filled with people eating and laughing and enjoying themselves, and was drawn to a tunnel that exuded feelings of bliss and tranquillity. He says he hopes when his time does come, that tunnel is still there. Jennings' mother also saw a vision of her sister at the moment of her death, half a world away. Junger argues that there might be biological reasons for many near-death phenomena, but the one that is most difficult to explain is these visions of the dead. I do wonder what is going on; maybe one day I'll find out.
 

Maggot Moon

Sally Gardner's Maggot Moon was another acquisition from the Allen & Unwin shelves. It was much awarded when it came out in the UK in 2012, picking up the Carnegie Medal and the Costa Book Award. It's set in an alternate reality, where it seems the Nazis (the 'Motherland') won the Second World War and took over Britain, and now are staging a fake moon landing which fifteen year old Standish discovers.

Gardner, who is herself dyslexic, writes from Standish's viewpoint with mixed metaphors, malapropisms and other confusions of language -- I suspect this feat is what garnered so much admiration from critics. The story is packed with action and danger, and the climax is harrowing. Having said all that, this book was not for me. It's incredibly violent, with one of Standish's classmates being beaten to death by a teacher early in the book. Standish is fifteen, but his comprehension of events seems to come from a much younger child. In fact, that might be my main problem -- the plot and the story are definitely in dystopian YA territory, but the style and the voice seem to me to be pitched at middle grade level. Standish and Hector are close friends, but they build a cardboard rocket together and pretend to fly to the moon, which seems like something a pair of ten year olds might do rather than a couple of adolescent boys.

The chapters are extremely short and punchy, there are striking illustrations throughout, and the whole book seems designed to catch the attention of reluctant boy readers (maybe another reason why it was so highly awarded). But as a whole package, Maggot Moon just doesn't work for me.
 

A Sense of Story and A Sounding of Storytellers

 

A Sense of Story and A Sounding of Storytellers are not really two books, more like one and a half. A Sense of Story was published in 1971, featuring nineteen short essays about (then) contemporary children's authors, from the UK, the US and Australia. In 1979 came A Sounding of Storytellers, which contains fourteen essays, seven revised versions of pieces from the earlier book, and seven new ones.

John Rowe Townsend was himself a children's writer, and a thoughtful, interested and insightful critic. He names Philippa Pearce's Tom's Midnight Garden as a 'masterpiece'; he correctly points out Alan Garner's almost completely flat characters, but forgives him; he notes the currents of deep time slowly flowing beneath the surface of Rosemary Sutcliff's Roman novels. These collections showcase many of the favourite authors of my childhood; is it any wonder that, having picked up the second volume in a secondhand shop, I immediately ordered the first? I couldn't resist finding out what Townsend had to say about Joan Aiken, L.M. Boston, H.F. Brinsmead, Eleanor Estes, Madeleine L'Engle (he drily remarks that he can't like her Austin family as much as they like themselves!) and Patricia Wrightson.

There are also writers here I've never come across (mostly American), like Bill and Vera Cleaver, Virginia Hamilton and John Christopher. I'm also wondering why I've never read anything by Andre Norton. William Mayne, now disgraced and almost impossible to find as a result, appears in both books, long before his public downfall. Townsend also writes about his long-time partner, Jill Paton Walsh, with admirable objectivity. In many ways, these books were a meander down memory lane, and a very enjoyable one.

Small Things Like These

Claire Keegan's 2021 novella, Small Things Like These, was another book that cropped up in a high place during the Radio National book countdown. I've come to realise that most of the books that came in high on that list were books that had been made into films or TV series, which I guess raised their profile, but which has disappointed me slightly! (A notable exception to this observation is Richard Flanagan's Question 7, which I think would be impossible to film.) I wasn't aware of the film of Small Things Like These either, but now I'm tempted to check it out.

Keegan's book is barely even a novella, it's practically a long short story, only just over 100 pages (with generous spacing). However, it is, as Hilary Mantel claims on the cover, exquisite. It follows Bill Furlong, who runs a coal and timber yard, who's raised himself from 'nothing,' ie illegitimacy, and is now himself the father of five cherished daughters. He delivers coal to the convent on the hill, where behind locked doors unfortunate girls live as virtual slaves; he's haunted by what he witnesses, and ultimately finds it in his heart to show compassion to one of these poor outcasts. All this doesn't happen in medieval times, or even in the Victorian era -- we are in Ireland in the 1980s. But it's a time that might as well be hundreds of years ago, crushed by the iron fist of the church's power.

Claire Keegan packs a lot into her hundred pages. You could just about read it at a sitting; and you should.
 

Swallow's Dance

Another treasure from the Allen & Unwin shelves (I told you I did well). Swallow's Dance is the middle volume of Wendy Orr's Minoan trilogy, though the three books don't share any characters. I already have Dragonfly Song, but I hadn't read the other two in the series. All three books are written in a mix of free verse and prose.

Swallow's Dance centres on Leira, a young girl from the priestly caste who is on the verge of going through her Learning to become a woman and a priestess in her turn when disaster strikes -- a devastating earthquake destroys her city and injures her mother's mind. Leira, her now child-like mother and their elderly servant Nunu become a close unit, with Leira having to assume responsibility for providing for them all in a strange city where they are not welcome.

Wendy Orr was inspired to create Leira after noticing a very individual snub-nosed girl gathering saffron on an ancient wall fresco.

Poor Leira has to face many dangers and suffering, both physical and emotional, before her more hopeful ending, though all her troubles are certainly not over and she doesn't know what has happened to half her family. The worst tragedies happen off the page, so it's not too confronting for young readers, and Leira is a resourceful and determined heroine, though she does have periods of anxiety and terror. The Bronze Age background is fascinating, and there is beauty and joy as well as peril and sorrow in Leira's story. I really enjoyed Swallow's Dance, and what a great cover from Josh Durham (who also designed the cover of Crow Country).

The Seven

I'm embarrassed to admit that I'd never read any of Chris Hammer's bestselling crime fiction, though The Seven is number six (ha ha, six seven... iykyk...) This was another score from the Allen & Unwin offices, and my publisher saw me hesitating over it and urged me to take it, saying it was perfect holiday fiction and very readable, all of which turned out to be true. I really enjoyed The Seven and it will prompt me  seek out Hammer's previous novels.

Hammer pulls off a neat trick in The Seven, which is to run three parallel narratives: a current murder investigation (written in the present tense); events around the disappearance and probable murder of two young people in the 1990s (written in the past tense); and the story of the early history of the town of Yuwonderie, told through the letters of a young, well-educated Aboriginal woman. All these layers fold together to build a satisfying mystery, with interesting history and a cast of well-rounded characters. 

Hammer worked as a political journalist for decades before turning to fiction, which has given him both access to meaty plot substance, and a talent for economically sketching people. Terrific gifts for a crime writer. And extremely readable, to boot.
 

Puzzled

 

Another score from the Allen & Unwin book shelves. I love David Astle's columns about language in The Age, and I also hear his evening radio show from time to time, and I like him a lot. But his main claim to fame is as the notorious DA who sets the Friday cryptic crossword, also in The Age, which Melbourne people have long jokingly characterised as Don't Attempt. 

I like crosswords, I do one every day and two on Saturdays. But cryptics have always been beyond my comprehension. I was in awe of a fellow student at college who once tried patiently to explain to me how they worked -- and English wasn't even her first language. So in Puzzled I saw my chance for a crash course in the mysteries of cryptics once and for all.

Alas, after bravely wrestling with the whole book, I can only conclude that I don't have the right kind of brain for cryptic crosswords. Astle starts gently enough with anagrams and double meanings, but soon we're swimming in 'hybrids', 'manipulations' and '&lits' (or perhaps drowning!) Even with Astle holding my hand, I couldn't figure out most of these clues. Fortunately, the course in crossword solving is also interleaved with autobiographical episodes from David Astle's life, which are both entertaining and interesting and which helped me through the difficult patches. Puzzled is a beautifully constructed piece of work, but alas, I'm not much closer to mastering the mysteries than I was before -- my fault, not David Astle's!

Hexwood

 

I was very lucky a few weeks ago to visit my publishers, Allen and Unwin, who are moving from their long-time offices in East Melbourne, a lovely old Victorian terrace house opposite St Patrick's cathedral. They're just relocating around the corner, but it still meant packing up a LOT of books, and there were a few bookshelves of stuff they weren't going to take with them, which meant Free Books for visitors... Suffice to say I left with a big box of treasures!

 I pounced on this copy of Diana Wynne Jones' Hexwood immediately. I've read it before, years ago, but never snagged a copy of my own, and I remembered feeling completely bewildered by it. This time, I vowed, I'd make sense of it. 

Alas, I still feel, if not completely bewildered, certainly quite befuddled. The book seems to consist of about four different stories shoehorned into one narrative. Characters are not who they appear to be; they are not even who they think they are. Everyone is being manipulated by a reality-warping machine called the Bannus, which has run out of control in an obscure corner of Earth and is sucking more and more people into its sphere. As well as playing with identity, it's playing games with time, so characters change in age and events run out of order. It's a very difficult novel to get a handle on, and I suspect it would probably take the kind of dedicated multiple readings that young adolescents especially excel at to really grasp it.

I must say the plot made slightly more sense to me this time around. Maybe when I'm a very old lady and I've reread it a few more times, I'll understand exactly what's going on. Hexwood is the kind of book I admire, and it's obviously very clever, but I can't say that I love it.

A Smart Suit and White Gloves

This recent publication from Girls Gone By was a Christmas present to myself. Kay Whalley has put together a brilliant, funny and fascinating survey of career books for girls, mostly from the three decades after World War II, when job opportunities were opening up for women -- but not too far!

Teaching, nursing and secretarial jobs were the most popular options (though it's quite difficult to make secretarial jobs sound dramatically interesting), but these books were always careful to show that, whichever career path a girl chose, there would be plenty of eligible young men around, and it was taken for granted that the 'career' might occupy a few years after school or university, it would almost certainly come to an abrupt end after marriage. Home-making and child-rearing was assumed to be a woman's real life's work; a girl might train to be a nurse, but there was no point trying to be a doctor like her brother might.

There are excursions into more obscure areas, like floristry, television production (a new field) or even electronics, and some of these books really strike a blow for female independence. However, Whalley often fumes at the inherent sexism of some authors. She makes it clear how valuable these books are as social documents, providing details of everyday life and expectations that retrospective history books might miss. Whalley's plot summaries made me laugh out loud; we can usually tell who the heroine's future husband will be because he has a strong jaw and picks up her dropped books in a corridor. Fathers usually don't approve of spending money on training or educating their daughters; mothers might be more quietly supportive.

I can see myself collecting some of these titles for myself. A Smart Suit and White Gloves might have been a dangerous purchase!
 

Reading Round-up 2025

I read like an absolute fiend this last year -- 189 books in total. Books have always been my preferred escape method and I burrowed into them this last year for comfort and distraction. Perhaps it's no accident that I didn't do much writing! Or if I did, it didn't really lead anywhere -- yet. Fingers crossed for a more productive 2026 on that front.

Kids/YA v Adult

I read just over a third children's and young adult books, and about two thirds adult books. Last year I did less nostalgic mining of my bookshelves for old favourites, and made a conscious decision to read more new YA fiction, making my way through the Notables list of the CBCA awards, which led me to discover a lot of really good authors and books I probably wouldn't have found otherwise. I think I'll probably do the same again this year. One old favourite of the kids' books I did enjoy was Antonia Forest's The Player's Boy and The Players and the Rebels, the former of which I haven't read since high school -- it stood up very well!

Male v Female Authors

Quite a few more blokes in the mix in 2025! I discovered some new-to-me writers like Percival Everett and George Saunders, as well as James Rebanks and some YA Australian authors that, honestly, I might not have picked up if I wasn't reading my way through a list. A warning against my own prejudices.

 

Fiction v Non-Fiction

A little bit more fiction last year than the year before, I think, but still a pretty healthy proportion of non-fiction books.

 

Sources

 

Where would I be without my libraries? All the Notables YA books came from my local library, which bumped up that total. The secondhand category includes books from street libraries as well as bought from Brotherhood Books, secondhand books shops and op shop finds. I borrowed some books from friends and some from my daughters. New books is mostly gifts (some to myself!) I read far fewer books from my own shelves in 2025, and a lot of those were adult books: I revisited some high school favourites like The Leopard, A Month in the Country and I Heard the Owl Call My Name.

 

Author origin
 

Some significant changes from 2024 in this chart! I read fewer UK authors, and more American ones -- particularly surprising since I'm almost boycotting US culture at the moment in other fields. I also read a lot more Australian authors, thanks to the Notables challenge, plus a good proportion of First Nations authors. I also read one Irish book, three from New Zealand, two by Canadian authors, one Italian, and one with a mix of nationalities.

 

Highlights

I started a Helen Garner binge at the beginning of the year but didn't finish, thanks to the plethora of  other books jostling for my attention. But I will definitely reread more of her non-fiction this year. 

 

In fiction, I also binged on Curtis Sittenfeld, Barbara Pym and Eva Ibbotson, all delightful in very different ways. I'm loving the current crop of Regency/Austen era lady detective novels around at the moment -- more, please! Sarah Moss's Ghost Wall was a haunting miniature masterpiece.

 

In non-fiction, standouts for me were Kate Grenville's Unsettled and also Searching for the Secret River. I revelled in Ruth Park's autobiographies, Fishing in the Styx and A Fence Around the Cuckoo. John Higgs' history of Dr Who, Exterminate! Regenerate! was a deep pleasure to read.  Martin Flanagan's Question 7 took my breath away.

 

 

Pole to Pole

Happy New Year, everyone! Michael Palin's Pole to Pole was the last book I finished before we ticked over into 2026. It's taken me sooo long to read -- it's been my book-beside-the-bed for months and I stalled about two thirds of the way through. Pole to Pole is Palin's diary of the making of the BBC travel series of the same name, following Around the World in 80 Days, only this time travelling the globe from north to south, rather than circumnavigating (also this trip took about 150 days, rather than 80). It was followed by Full Circle, where he travelled around the Pacific Rim, a trip that took the best part of a year.

I'm actually not very good at reading in bed, but the diary format made it easy to knock off one entry every night, once I'd resolved to actually finish reading the bloody thing. The team's travel through Europe is relatively straightforward, but moving through Africa is much more complicated, skirting war zones and trying to avoid monsoon weather, aiming to meet up with a ship sailing for Antarctica. You have to admire the production team, who have to grapple with all kinds of unexpected obstacles, transport breakdowns, illnesses, and the ultimate last minute hiccup when the Antarctic-bound ship can't take them on board after all, requiring a scramble to organise a charter flight instead.

As always, Palin is witty, affable and observant company. This trip took place in 1991, just before the dissolution of the Soviet Union, which would have led to them travelling through about five extra countries. Borders in Africa have also changed significantly in thirty five years, making Pole to Pole an even more interesting historical record.