Jennifer Byrne from the First Tuesday Book Club on ABC1 says her comfort book is Marjorie Morningstar by Herman Wouk. She read it when she was a teenager and it resonated. It’s the story of a Jewish teenager in the 1930s, living in New York with dreams of becoming an actress – she falls in love [...]
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Here’s the massive coincidence. The last two books I’ve read have been The Islands by Di Morrissey and Careless in Red by Elizabeth George. (I know I’m supposed to have been reading The White Tiger by Aravind Adiga – the Booker Prize-winning novel – but I just can’t get into it) Now on the face [...]
When you pick up a Di Morrissey book you are not expecting high literature, or even medium-high. You are expecting a rollocking saga with beautiful women and unreachable men set in an exotic location with a nod to the local culture. In this novel that is exactly what you get. Young Catherine, off on a [...]
I think this is Tim Winton’s best novel. He has lost his earlier pretentiousness. His writing is spare, evocative and compelling. The tale is told by a paramedic in his 50s who attends an accidental hanging. He knows it’s accidental because of events in his youth, and so you are drawn into this tale of coming [...]
I had no interest in picking up Helen Garner’s latest novel The Spare Room. Helen has always seemed a little worthy, a little hard core for me. I based this assessment on what I’d seen of her in the media and some vague memory of her writing something on sexual harassment… I haven’t actually read [...]
I like Val McDermid’s writing. I always have. From Wire in the Blood to her lighter novels, they never fail to entertain. Highly descriptive, great character profiles, a page-turning plot. In The Grave Tattoo the action centres around the discovery of a 200 year old body in the peat of the Lakes District. The body [...]
First of all, I LOVED Gone With the Wind. The sweeping saga, the feisty heroine, the dashing, rich, and rather butch hero… with a soft side. *Swoon* And I’ve not loved sequels written by random authors. It was there on the “new” table at the library and well, what was a girl to do? I [...]
Julian Fellowes you might remember wrote the screenplay for Gosford Park – and won an Oscar for it.. In this novel of manners he tells the story of a social climbing young lady who manages to capture the heart of a young heir. Once ensconced in the aristocracy she puts it in jeopardy. The story [...]
Angela’s Ashes won the Pulitzer Prize in 1997. Everybody was talking about it that year and mostly they were saying how sad it was. Oh brilliantly written dahling but oh soooo sad. Maybe because of that and also maybe because I’m not into autobiographies I decided Frank McCourt’s memoir of his childhood was a book [...]
