What Katie Read: Kathryn Heyman, Ursula Dubosarsky and more!

Welcome to this month’s edition of What Katie Read! I’m here with some truly brilliant reads this month – read on …

The Vanishing Act of Esme Lennox

by Maggie O’Farrell

Maggie O’Farrell was a new discovery for me this year, and I am now consuming all of her ouevre with voracity. I keep thinking: why haven’t I read her before? What took me so long to discover her?

The Vanishing Act of Esme Lennox tells the story of two women whose lives collide when Iris discovers she has a great-aunt she never knew locked up in a mental asylum for more than 60 years. The narrative slips back and forth between Iris and Esme and her sister Kitty, who has dementia, and is centred on the conundrums at the heart of the story – why was Esme committed? And what will happen now she is to be released?

With delicacy and deftness, Maggie O’Farrell weaves the lives of these three women into a truly haunting novel that I cannot stop thinking about. So good it is humbling.

Buy it here

Fury

by Kathryn Heyman

I was on a panel with Kathryn Heyman at the Bellingen Writers & Readers Festival, and heard her read a passage from her new memoir, Fury. I bought it straight away – the excerpt she read was so full of power and grace and beauty, and felt so relevant for the times in which we live, that I knew I had to read it.

Fury is an incredibly powerful and moving memoir of Kathryn’s survival and recovery after an traumatic assault, and the subsequent struggle to see her attacker charged and punished. The sections detailing the assault and the trial are confronting and heartbreaking, as are many of her other memories from her childhood growing up in a world in which sexism and sexual violence is so endemic. These scenes cut very close to home – some happened to me or to women whom I love. It’s a clarion call for change in our world, and a book I hope many will read for that reason.

But it is also a story of survival, recovery, and redemption, and a beautiful paean to the ocean and its wild power to heal and transform us. The writing is glorious, the structure intricate and cleverly constructed, and the story so intimate and vulnerable, it made me weep. One of my best reads of the year so far.

Buy it here

Only Happiness Here: In Search of Elizabeth von Arnim

by Gabrielle Carey

Many years ago, I read Elizabeth and Her German Garden by Elizabeth von Arnim, a wonderfully warm and funny book about a young woman who restores an unloved garden and finds true peace and joy there. I re-read it again every few years (it’s so slim it only takes me a few hours), as a kind of restorative medicine for the soul. I also adore her novel Enchanted April which in 1991 was turned into a charming movie starring Miranda Richardson and Josie Lawrence.

I did not realise that Elizabeth von Arnim was Australian, and grew up only half-an-hour away from me until recently. This really sparked my interest in her life, and I began to read up on her. So imagine my delight when I found Gabrielle Carey had written a bibliomemoir of her life and work called Only Happiness Here, exploring her own love of Elizabeth’s von Arnim’s work and how much it taught her about the secret of a life filled with contentment, purpose and joy.

I love bibliomemoirs. They are one of my favourite genres to read. Combining the biography of a writer with the reader’s own personal response to their work, they are like having a wonderful conversation with a kindred spirit. I curled up with Gabrielle Carey’s book one Sunday morning soon after finishing my latest novel (which feels a little like you are convalescing after a very long illness), and devoured the whole book in a single sitting. I then watched the Enchanted April movie again. It was a truly delightful day.

Elizabeth von Arnim was born in Sydney in the mid-1880s, grew up in Kirribilli, went to Europe with her family on a kind of Grand Tour, and met and married a much older German count (nicknamed ‘the man of wroth’ in Elizabeth and Her German Garden). Her first book became a runaway bestseller, and she went on to have a fascinating and flourishing career. She scandalously left the German count and later married a mad English lord, and was close friends (and perhaps lovers) with E. M. Forster and H. G. Wells. Her life was bold and joyous and enviable, and I loved discovering it through Gabrielle Carey’s thoughtful and insightful book. Give yourself a treat and buy Only Happiness Here in a bundle with Elizabeth and her German Garden and Enchanted April – I promise you it’s a dose of sunshine and sea air for your soul.

Buy it here

Once We Were Sisters

by Sheila Kohler

Sheila Kohler is a South-African-born author best known for her novel Cracks, inspired by her experiences as a girl in a boarding school in the remote African veld which was turned into a movie a few years ago starring Eva Green. She has written that her novel was partly inspired by her long obsession with the theme of violence in intimate relationships, caused by the death of her sister after her brutal, controlling brother-in-law drove their car off the road.

Once We Were Sisters is Sheila Kohler’s memoir of her privileged childhood growing up in apartheid South Africa, the traumatic death of her father and consequent banishment to boarding school with her older sister Maxine, and her escape from the claustrophobic family atmosphere to Paris, university, and sexual freedom.

At the centre of the memoir is her close bond with her sister, who stayed behind in Johannesburg to marry and raise a family. Sheila Kohler writes of their narcissistic alcoholic mother, their struggles to balance freedom and family, and Sheila’s growing fear for her sister who has become trapped in a brutal marriage. The writing is direct and incisive, constantly circling back to Maxine’s tragic and mysterious death, and the shock waves it sends through Sheila’s life.

A truly poignant and compelling read!

Buy it here

Pierre’s Not There

by Ursula Dubosarsky & Christopher Nielsen (Illustrator)

Pierre’s Not There is the latest children’s book by the Australian Children’s Laureate, Ursula Dubosarsky. It’s a delightful magical fable with subtle undercurrents of darker themes – a girl turns into a wolf to save a boy who is trapped in a sorrowful past. The story has some beautiful fairy tale elements to it, as well as a magical puppet theatre, and is the kind of book I would have happily devoured as an eight-year-old. Beautifully written as always, with lovely illustrations by Christopher Nielson.

Buy it here

The Girl Remains

by Katherine Firkin

I’ve been reading a lot of contemporary crime written by Australian women in the past couple of years, loving the mix of suspense and intrigue with the moody Australian landscape. The Girl Remains by Katherine Firkin is set on the Mornington Peninsula, and the small coastal town with its fibro shacks, wild beaches, and stretches of impregnable bush reminded me vividly of my own childhood summer holidays. Luckily none of mine ever turned out like the characters in this book!

In September 1998, three teenage girls on school holidays together went out for a night of illicit fun and games. Only two returned. The disappearance of fifteen-year-old Cecilia May has haunted the town of Blairgowrie ever since. Twenty years later, her bones turn up on the beach and police detective Emmett Corban is tasked with investigating the cold case. His life is complicated by the fact his wife is a freelance photographer seeking to make her break with stolen photos of the crime, and a convicted paedophile who lives in the town has already been judged and found guilty by the townsfolk.

Well-paced and full of twists and turns, this is a very readable police procedural. I had the added pleasure of guessing the identity of the murderer (which, given the tricky plot, was not easy).

Buy it here

Kate Forsyth

About Kate

Kate Forsyth wrote her first novel aged seven and has now sold more than a million books worldwide. Her newest book, co-written with Belinda Murrell, is Searching for Charlotte, which tells the fascinating story of Australia’s first children’s author (and Forsyth’s own distant relation) Charlotte Waring Atkinson. Her novels for adults include The Blue Rose, inspired by the true story of the quest for a blood-red rose during the French Revolution, Beauty in Thorns, a Pre-Raphaelite reimagining of Sleeping Beauty, and Bitter Greens, which won the 2015 American Library Association award for Best Historical Fiction. Kate’s books for children include the fantasy series The Witches of Eileanan.

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.

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The Blue Rose

by Kate Forsyth

Moving between Imperial China and 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 Belisima-sur-le-Lac in Brittany. Her father, the Marquis, 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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About the Contributor

Kate Forsyth