Kate Forsyth is one of Australia’s most treasured storytellers. On today’s edition of What Katie Read, she gives us the rundown on all of the best books she’s been reading lately …
The Fragments
by Toni Jordan
What a wonderful book this is! Toni Jordan is one of my favourite Australian authors, drawing effortlessly on multiple genres to create charming, warm-hearted and utterly compelling novels that are each distinctly different from each other.
The Fragments is part-romantic comedy, part-literary mystery, and part-historical drama, all of which add up to a fresh and beguiling story centred on the lost novel of a mysterious woman writer of the 1930s.
Inga Karlson’s first book was a literary sensation, but tragically she died in a warehouse fire which also destroyed the only known copy of her second book. All that was left was a handful of burnt scraps of paper, tantalising her heartbroken fans and creating a literary industry that kept academics busy for decades.
Nearly fifty years later, in the 1980s, the fragments of her scorched book are brought to Brisbane as part of an exhibition celebrating Inga Karlson’s life and work. Caddie, a bookseller and failed academic, waits in a queue for hours to see the exhibition – she was named after Inga Karlson’s famous heroine and has worshipped her work all her life.
She falls into conversation with an enigmatic old woman, who seems to know more about the fragments than she should. Caddie is galvanised. She must know more. So she sets out on a quest to find the old woman, which leads her straight back to her failed dissertation and the man who broke her heart.
Moving back and forwards between 1980s Brisbane and 1930s New York, this is a book full of surprises. Brilliant!
Buy it here
Barbed Wire and Cherry Blossoms
by Anita Heiss
A delicate and simply told love story set in Cowra, NSW, in the aftermath of the famous breakout of Japanese prisoners-of-war from their internment camp in 1944. Anita Heiss has drawn on her own family’s oral history to create this story of a Japanese soldier who is kept hidden by an Indigenous family who were themselves living in detention on an Aboriginal mission nearby.
Hiroshi feels deep shame at being made a prisoner and for failing to fight for his Emperor, but he cannot bring himself to commit ritual suicide like so many of the other escaped Japanese soldiers. He is kept hidden by the Williams family, who work for a pittance for the mission. Food is scarce, and feeding an escaped prisoner stretches their resources to their limits. But they know what it is like to be considered a second-class citizen, and determine to act with the justice and compassion that White Australia has failed to show to them.
It is the job of the eldest daughter, Mary, to take Hiroshi food and water. Gradually, as they talk and share details of their lives, they fall in love. It is dangerous for them both, though. Hiroshi is an enemy, and feeling against the Japanese is running high in the small Australian town. And Mary is no more free – she is living under laws which seek to keep Indigenous people disenfranchised and enslaved.
It was this aspect of the novel which I found most interesting. Anita Heiss draws clear parallels between the prisoner-of-war camp and the mission, and indeed makes it clear the Japanese prisoners often had a better quality of life than the original owners of the land.
Buy it here
The River Wife
by Heather Rose
A strange, beautiful, lyrical book, set in modern-day Tasmania, about a woman who every night changes into the form of a fish. She does not understand where she came from or why she must change. She only knows she is a river wife and must sing the river’s songs, and that she is desperately lonely.
This book walks the shadowy borderland between fiction and fable, prose and poetry, myth and magic realism. It is a love story, an exploration of the importance of story to the making of self, a paean to the beauty and power of nature, and a warning of the dangers of not listening. Utterly haunting, exquisite, and unique.
Buy it here
Three Women
by Lisa Taddeo
A journalist named Lisa Taddeo spent a decade talking to women about their sex lives, asking questions, probing for details, encouraging them to open up and share. She then writes a book which tells – in an extraordinary act of ventriloquism – three of their stories. Two of the women have their identity protected by pseudonyms. The third wants her name to be known.
The first woman, Lina, is married to a man who will not kiss her on the mouth. Through social media, she reconnects with her teenage sweetheart—a married man—and seduces him into an all-consuming affair.
The second woman, Maggie, had sex with her English teacher whilst still only a teenager. The fallout from the affair, and ensuing court case, destroyed her life while her lover is named North Dakota’s Teacher of the Year.
The third and last woman is Sloane, rich, thin and successful. She is married to a man who likes to watch her have sex with others. He picks out partners for her, and she works hard to satisfy his and their needs. She does not know how to explain or articulate her need to please others, until she reads 50 Shades of Grey.
Each of the three women carry secrets. Each have been harmed in some way. Each struggle to negotiate love, desire, and longing. Each of their stories is unique, personal, and yet somehow universal.
Astonishingly frank and intimate, this book is both shocking and yet heart-breaking. A tour-de-force of imaginative reporting.
Buy it here
Black Spring
by Alison Croggan
I collect books faster than I can read them. Most of them I buy, many are given to me as gifts. The only way I could read them all was if I spent my whole life with my nose in a book and lived several centuries.
The books I haven’t yet read are stacked and double-stacked on a bookshelf in my bedroom, and when I’ve read them they go into their proper place, by genre and alphabetically, in my library. Every month or so, I rummage around at the back of my to-be-read bookshelf and pull out a book that has been hidden there far too long.
Black Spring is a reimagining of Wuthering Heights, set in a world of wizards, mutes, vendettas and wild magic. Written by poet, critic and novelist Alison Croggon, it was published in 2012 which means it has been waiting for me to give it life in my imagination for seven years. I love Alison Croggon’s writing and so I knew I was going to love this book. I’m so glad it finally sprang into my hand.
Constructed, like Wuthering Heights, as a story within a story, it follows the well-known trajectory of love, obsession, revenge and tragedy of the original book by Emily Bronte. Alison Croggon, has, however, created something quite new and remarkable with her addition of magical elements. It has given Black Spring an eeriness that Wuthering Heights demonstrated in its famous scene of the ghost sobbing outside in the snowstorm, but did not deliver quite so powerfully elsewhere. Alison Croggon has taken this gothic scene and extended its spine-chilling, unnerving quality throughout the entirety of the narrative.
She has also simplified and strengthened the primary narrative arc of Wuthering Heights, losing all the bits that most readers skip over. The result is a work of dark, poetic intensity that acknowledges its inspiration but creates its own uncanny, mysterious world.
Buy it here
Gone By Midnight
by Candice Fox
I’ve been reading a lot of contemporary crime in the past year, mainly by Australian women writers, but had not yet given Candice Fox a whirl. That’s only because it can sometimes be hard to know where to start with a writer that has a whole lot of books, and I hadn’t had time to google ‘Candice Fox books chronological order’. Because crime books should be read in order, don’t you think?
Anyway, I was in Brisbane for GenreCon, I’d read all the books I had packed, and the bookshop had only one copy of her books left: Gone By Midnight. My deep FOMO caused me to grab it, and I read it on the flight home.
What a great crime novel! Pacy, pithy, clever, full of surprises, with plenty of comic relief to help balance out the horror of a story about a missing child. Her characters were fabulously well-drawn, full of vulnerabilities and heartache, and yet also hope.
Of course, I soon realised it is part of a series, and that I really should have started at the beginning. I fully intend to now!
Buy it here
The Story Keeper
by Anna Mazzola
Take the Isle of Skye in the Highlands of Scotland in the mid-nineteenth century.
Add a curious young woman with a deep love of folklore and fairy tales.
Throw in the body of a girl, her eyes eaten out by birds.
Add a lame old woman with haunted eyes, a young man struggling to find his way in the world, and a laird, a doctor, and a minister who all put their own comfort and desires above the needs of others.
Stir in mist, rain, wind and mud. Add a hefty dollop of secrets and lies. Then deliver it all with pace, style and verve.
The result?
The perfect book for me!
This eerie and atmospheric historical mystery by Anna Mazzola has been justifiably compared to Hannah Kent’s Burial Rites and Beth Underdown’s The Witch Finder’s Sister, two books I absolutely adored. I loved it!
Buy it here
Diving for Seahorses
by Hilde Østby and Ylva Østby
Diving for Seahorses: Exploring the Science and Secrets of Human Memory is an utterly fascinating book about how and why we remember and forget, written by two sisters: the writer Hilde Østby and the clinical neuropsychologist Dr. Ylva Østby.
The title is inspired by the tiny curve of brain matter buried deep in our temporal lobes called the hippocampus. The doctor who first dissected that part of the brain in 1564 thought its shape resembled that of a sea horse, and so named it from the Greek – hippos meaning ‘horse’ and kampos, meaning ‘sea monster’.
I am always interested in books about the brain and neurobiology, and have read a great many of them over the years. The Østby sisters do a great job of making a complex and difficult subject readable and understandable, weaving in memoir and personal anecdote through the science. They are Norwegian, and so are many of the people whom they interview. This also made the book seem really fresh—sometimes the Ameri-centrism of this kind of creative non-fiction can really narrow down thought.
For example, one of the people they speak with is a young man who was injured at Norway’s most horrific mass shooting in 2011. Adrian was hit by the last bullet fired that day, and so he was a witness to the horror. He is tormented by involuntary flashbacks and survivor guilt. Indeed, the whole day was a national trauma for the peaceful Norwegians, a ‘flashbulb memory’. The chapter in which Hilde and Ylva Østby examine this event, and its reverberations though the national consciousness, is remarkable for its clarity and force in examining the long-term effects of such distress and in finding news ways to manage post-traumatic stress disorder.
The chapter on false and implanted memories is equally riveting, with an exploration of how Norwegian police have changed their methods of interrogation from the US system of confession-focused questioning—which often leads to false confessions—to the British method of ‘investigative interview.’ In fact, every chapter is fascinating! It’s a book I’ll be returning to again and again, I know.
Buy it here
The Joy of High Places
by Patti Miller
All my life I’ve loved to walk. Being out in this beautiful world, moving my body and letting my mind drift, seeing things I’ve never seen before and feeling myself strong and well and full of creative energy—walking is a thing of small, easy, everyday joy.
I’ve always wanted to do a pilgrimage, one foot after another, on a long old road. I listen, with amazed longing, to those of my friends who have done it. A few days, a week, a month, many weeks, spent walking and thinking along paths beaten into the landscape over a thousand years.
I’ve never managed to do it. Children, work, deadlines and duties have all kept me deeply rooted at home (though I do travel as much as I can).
So I love to read about other people walking, and imagine myself doing it one day too. Patti Miller is someone I’ve followed on social media for a long time, loving her accounts and photographs of long arduous walks along the Camino in Spain, and other famous walks in England, France, Switzerland, Greece. I bought myself a pair of hiking boots, and have begun trying to build up my strength and stamina, and I plan where I will walk, one day.
Patti Miller’s new book, The Joy of High Places, is a memoir of walking but also of flying. It begins: ‘One day a few years ago, one of my brothers fell to earth and smashed his spine in several places when his paragliding wing collapsed. He believed he was going to die and then, when he realised he was still alive, he thought he would never walk again.’
Her brother Barney’s struggle to learn to walk again, and fly again, is inspiring and poignant, and offers Patti a chance to examine the human longing to be as a bird, soaring high above the world. It also is an examination of family dynamics, and the way we can know someone all their lives but never know them at all.
But, most of all, The Joy of High Places is a celebration of the human spirit, and of our deep and profound connection with nature.
When I’d finished, I posted a photo of the book surrounded by white flowers on Instagram with the caption: ‘I read THE JOY OF HIGH PLACES by Patti Miller in a single sitting yesterday – I adored it! The word I keep thinking of transcendent – it’s so full of joy, beauty, intelligence & wonder. A paean to the power of walking, flying & family.’
One of my favourite books of the year.
Buy it here
Angel Mage
by Garth Nix
Oooh, a new book by Garth Nix!
Ooooh, about angels!
Ooooooh! Set in an alternative 17th century France! With a dedication to Alexandre Dumas and the makers of The Three Musketeers!
It’s a no-brainer. As soon as I heard about it, I had Angel Mage on pre-order and devoured it the moment it arrived.
Garth Nix writes fantasy just the way I like it. Clever, complex, vivid and compelling, with characters that leap off the page and a plot that twists and turns and soars and plunges like a rollercoaster.
This is a new world for him, and I already love it just as much as I love the Old Kingdom. I have a particular soft spot for 17th century France, thanks to The Three Musketeers—indeed I’ve written a book of my own set there and then. And I’ve had a lifelong fascination with angels—I actually collect them, though not perhaps as you imagine.
Anyway, Angel Mage was pure delight from beginning to end. We have a beautiful young mage who can kill an angel and uses her power over them for evil. And then we have four young people drawn inexplicably together, as if by fate. In brief, they are:
Agnez, a dashing Musketeer who can never swallow an insult and who whips out her sword at the slightest provocation.
Henri, the disregarded younger son with a knack for numbers and the need to make his fortune.
Dorotea, the dreamy artist who can see people’s auras and has an uncanny strength in the summoning of angels
Simeon, a very large black doctor-in-training whose parents gave him a sex manual to read when he reached puberty.
One of the things I have always loved about Garth Nix is that he always has such interesting, multifaceted female characters, many of whom are in positions of natural authority. It is such a breath of fresh air in the often misogynistic worlds of fantasy (for example, I just re-read Ursula le Guin’s classic fantasy trilogy which begins with The Wizard of Earthsea, and was dismayed by the depiction of women in that world). Anyway, in Angel Mage there is a great deal of diversity, with characters being of all different colours, beliefs, and sexual orientations. I loved this so much, it made my day.
Everything about this young adult fantasy is pure magic! I’m just hoping for many more books set in this wonderful world.
Buy it here
Kate Forsyth
Kate Forsyth wrote her first novel aged seven and has now sold more than a million books worldwide. Her new novel, The Blue Rose, is inspired by the true story of the quest for a blood-red rose, moving between Imperial China and France during the ‘Terror’ of the French Revolution. Other novels for adults include Beauty in Thorns, a Pre-Raphaelite reimagining of Sleeping Beauty, Bitter Greens, which won the 2015 American Library Association award for Best Historical Fiction; and The Beast’s Garden, a stunning retelling of the Grimms’ Beauty and The Beast set in Nazi Germany.
Kate’s books for children include the collection of feminist fairy-tale retellings, Vasilisa the Wise & Other Tales of Brave Young Women, illustrated by Lorena Carrington, and the fantasy series The Impossible Quest. Named one of Australia’s Favourite 15 Novelists, Kate has a BA in literature, a MA in creative writing and a doctorate in fairy tale studies, and is also an accredited master storyteller with the Australian Guild of Storytellers. She is a direct descendant of Charlotte Waring Atkinson, the author of the first book for children ever published in Australia.
Find out more about Kate Forsyth here
The Blue Rose
Moving between Imperial China and France during the ‘Terror’ of the French Revolution and inspired by the true story of the quest for a blood-red rose.
Viviane de Faitaud has grown up alone at the Chateau de Belisama-sur-le-Lac in Brittany, for her father, the Marquis de Ravoisier, lives at the court of Louis XVI in Versailles. After a hailstorm destroys the chateau’s orchards, gardens and fields an ambitious young Welshman, David Stronach, accepts the commission to plan the chateau’s new gardens in the hope of making his name as a landscape designer...
Comments
No comments