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 Good Turn
by Dervla McTiernan
I can’t recommend this series of contemporary crime novels highly enough! If you are looking for cleverly plotted, superbly paced and character-driven police procedurals, you must check out Dervla McTiernan. Her first two books, The Ruin and The Scholar, introduced her hero DI Cormac Reilly, who works for the Irish Garda in Galway, in twisty, surprising and very atmospheric mysteries. In The Good Turn, the third in the series, other characters step to the front but the multiple points-of-view are so adroitly handled that there is no lessening of tension.
The book starts with a mute child and a mother who flees the city to try and save her from whatever has terrified her into silence. Then we have, in fairly quick succession, another child being kidnapped, and the shooting of the main suspect by a young police constable, Peter Fisher. He finds himself in disgrace, and sent back to his home village, a small place where his estranged father is the town cop. He’s put to work to tie up a few loose threads in a violent double murder, only to begin to suspect that the murderer is still at large and very close to home.
From this point on, the story gains momentum until I was honestly unable to put the book down – I was so worried for the main characters and so afraid of what might happen. And the ending was so brilliantly well done. This type of high-level crime writing is just addictive, and so I am now of course desperate for the next book in the series – I just hope Dervla is writing fast!
Buy it here
Phosphorescence
by Julia Baird
I read and enjoyed Julia Baird’s mammoth biography of Queen Victoria, which I thought beautifully written and impeccably researched, but I was drawn to buy this book because of its title: Phosphorescence: On Awe, Wonder & Things That Sustain You When the World Goes Dark. (Oh, and because of the cover. It’s gorgeous!)
I am a seeker of awe and wonder. I spend my life pursuing moments of peak experience, searching for joys both small and immense, trying to live a life filled with meaning and purpose. I am draw to wild places and moments of enchantment. And I’ve always been fascinated by living sources of light – glow-worms and fireflies and radiant jellyfish. I fill my fiction with them.
I also love books that weave together science, history, poetry, and personal memoir. I have similar books on bees, and roses, and apples, and birds, and mountains, and colours. So I was always going to love this book.
Essentially, it’s a collection of essays, many of which have been published in earlier forms before. As is to be expected, some are better than others.
I particularly loved the opening chapters, about swimming in the ocean, the need to immerse ourselves in nature, and searching for silence; and the final chapter, in which she quotes my favourite poet, Mary Oliver, and writes about her own rapturous encounter with phosphorescence, swimming in the dark off Manly Beach in Sydney:
‘The sea was black and the sky was black and I felt a little nervous: sharks feed in the dark. But just a few metres out from the shore, the sparkles appeared. I was transfixed. My fingers threw out fistfuls of sequins with every stroke. A galaxy of stars flew past my goggles. It was as though I was flying through space, like the opening scenes of the Star Wars movies, gliding rapidly through a universe only I could see.’
But every essay was interesting, perceptive, well-written and full of warmth. And, drawn together in this way, they cast light on the very human dilemma of longing for happiness, for meaning, for purpose, for connection. I thought this book was beautiful and wise and brave, and it’s one I will be dipping into again and again.
Buy it here
Two Owls at Eton: A True Story
by Jonathan Franklin
In April 1959, sixteen-year-old Jonathan Franklin is given two baby owls to care for, after their mother was shot by a gamekeeper. Jonathan liked to think he was a budding ornithologist, and had already cared for a thrush, a jackdaw and a pigeon. It was tawny owls, though, that fascinated him the most: ‘the silent flight, the sharp, mysterious hooting, the soft brown plumage and the extraordinary swivel-like turning of the head.’ So he was thrilled when he was given two ‘small balls of fluffy white down’. His parents, however, objected. Who will look after the owls when you are at school? they demanded.
So Jonathan decided to take the owlets back to Eton with him.
What follows is an utterly delightful book about the difficulties of raising two hungry, noisy, obstreperous owls in an upper-class boys’ school in between lessons, chapel, and cricket practise. Christened Tweedledee and Tweedledum – Dee and Dum for short – the two owls spend their days moulting feathers everywhere, spitting pellets of mouse skeletons on the floor, and biting his pen till the ink spurts, then leaving little owl claw-prints all over his homework.
The hardest struggle for Jonathan is feeding them. Luckily his school mates help, asking their parents to send any dead mouse or sparrow they find in the post, with malodorous results. Once the owls learn to fly, Jonathan’s life grows even trickier. Luckily, everyone – including the dreaded Beak – is charmed by the adorable owlets, and the year passes in a rush of hilarious misadventures.
However, it is Jonathan’s job to train his owls so that one day they can fly free in the wild once more. And that may well be the most difficult challenge of all.
Buy it here
The House of Dreams
by Kate Lord Brown
The House of Dreams is a dual timeline novel that moves between Nazi-occupied France and Long Island in the US in contemporary times. The primary narrative – and the most interesting – is the historical story which is centred on The American Relief Centre run by Varian Fry, who was the first American to be named “Righteous Among the Nations” by Yad Vashem (Israel’s official memorial to Holocaust victims). He was a journalist who was employed by the relief centre to help anti-Nazi and Jewish artists escape France between 1940 and 1941. Among the 2,000 people he helped save were Marc Chagall, André Breton, André Masson, Max Ernst, Walter Mehring, and Wanda Landowska. It’s an interesting story, and not one that has been explored in fiction before, at least that I know of.
The contemporary narrative is set in the year 2000, presumably to make it believable that a young artist who was helped by the American Relief Centre could still be alive. This artist – named Gabriel Lambert – escaped Vichy France, moved to the US, and built a life for himself and his wife on Long Island. However, he has many buried secrets and a young journalist named Sophie is determined to uncover them.
Kate Lord Brown has a beautiful, lyrical writing style, and I really enjoyed two of her earlier books, The Perfume Garden and The Beauty Chorus. I did not enjoy this one quite as much. As is often the case, I found the historical narrative much more engaging, probably because of the very real courage shown by Varian Fry and his team. I rather wish that this had been written as a straight historical, with more time spent developing the situation and characters of Marseilles in the 1940s, without the contemporary storyline distracting from such a powerful story. But this is only a small niggle. On the whole, I enjoyed The House of Dreams very much and feel I learned a lot about the brave people of the The American Relief Centre.
Buy it here
Vita & Virginia
by Sarah Gristwood
This is a beautifully presented and illustrated double biography of Virginia Woolf and Vita Sackville-West, friends, lovers, muses and rivals.
I’ve always been fascinated by their story, which I’ve read about in snippets elsewhere. This is the first book I’ve read that chronicles both their lives in equal measure.
In her introduction, Sarah Gristwood writes: ‘Virginia told a friend, just months before her death, that apart from her husband Leonard and her sister Vanessa, Vita was the only person she really loved … The bond that endured between those two women was predominantly, though not exclusively, one of the heart, and of the mind.’
Virginia was born in 1882 into a literary and artistic family, with an older half-sister born to her father, three older half-brothers born to her mother, as well as a sister and two brothers. Molested by one of her half-brothers as a child, and grieving the early death of her mother and half-sister, Virginia was unhappy and troubled.
Vita was born ten years later, at Knole in Kent, in 1892. Her grandfather was the Lionel Sackville-West, second Baron Sackville, and Knole had been given to an ancestor by Elizabeth I in the 16th century. Her grandmother was a Spanish dancer named Pepita. Vita’s mother, the illegitimate offspring of this unlikely liaison, married her cousin, her father’s nephew and heir. As an only child, and a girl, Vita could not inherit the house she grew up in, and this was to be the defining tragedy of her youth.
The two found solace in their writing.
They met in December 1922, and had a passionate affair. Vita inspired the gender-shifting protagonist of Virginia’s novel Orlando, described as ‘one of the longest and most charming love letters in history’. Their passion did not last, but their friendship did – Vita went on to have other lovers and to build her famous garden at Sissinghurst Castle, while Virginia wrote other books and struggled with her depression and manic moments.
A great deal of the allure of this book comes from the many quotes from the two women’s letters and diaries, and from the many gorgeous illustrations of their houses and gardens, no doubt facilitated by the book being published by the National Trust which protect properties the two women once lived in. To see their living-rooms and writing-rooms and gardens – preserved as they were when Virginia and Vita lived there – adds such intimacy and warmth. I have long wanted to visit Sissinghurst Castle and Monk’s House; after reading this book, they are top of my list.
Buy it here
The Viennese Girl
by Jenny Lecoat
One of my all-time favourite novels is The Guernsey Literary & Potato Peel Pie Society, and so this novel about a young Jewish woman hiding on the British island of Jersey during the German occupation in World War Two caught my eye at once. I’m writing my own story of resistance and subterfuge at the moment, and reading a lot of memoirs about brave people who hid those most at risk from the Nazis, so I was interested to learn this novel was inspired by the true story of its two main female characters, Hedwig Bercu and Dorothea Le Brocq.
Hedwig (called Hedy) is an Austrian Jew who flew to Jersey from Vienna only to find herself trapped on the island during the German occupation.
Dorothea is a local Jersey girl who falls in love with Hedy’s best friend, who is a German soldier. This means she is called a ‘Jerrybag’ by the locals, and accused of collaboration.
They are not friends to begin with, but as conditions under Nazi occupation worsen, Dorothea proves she is the most courageous and loyal of friends, keeping Hedy hidden within her home for months.
Matters are greatly complicated by the fact Hedy has also fallen for a German soldier, who risks his own life to try and help the two ostracised women.
Simply and directly told, this is a gentle story of friendship, love, and moral complexity. It does not demonise the Germans and idolise the British, as so many similar stories so. It shows that there is goodness and evil on all sides in a war, and that even the most ordinary people are capable of cruelty or courage, depending on what choices they make.
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...
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