And reports from Bairnsdale, in the Gippsland district, indicate that Mr Nils Desperandum, of Sarsfield, will have the largest crop of apples, this year, for miles around. - INTERSTATE WEEKLY.On a hot Australian morning I read the above advertisement out to June as we sat in the low-roofed kitchen of our old home in Dandenong. … Continue reading The Pea-Pickers | Eve Langley Part 2
One of the many pleasures of being a bookseller, is the insight I have gleaned into books no longer in print or hard to get. The pleasure part comes when enquiries by customers about said books, allows me to engage in some bookish research on their behalf. It is disheartening when I have to inform … Continue reading Book Stop #4
The performance at the heart of The Performance is a Samuel Beckett play, Happy Days. It was Beckett’s sixth play, written in response to his wife requesting something less depressing. I'm not sure he knew how to do that though. The play revolves around a central character, Winnie, a woman in her fifties. In Act … Continue reading The Performance | Claire Thomas #AWW
Book Stop is an occasional meme that allows me to travel and indulge in a good bookshop or library browse, during these strange, strange times when it's difficult to travel outside our home state, let alone the country. I plan to combine my bookish instincts with my itchy feet and explore the world via bookshops … Continue reading Book Stop #3
My first illness was that one most common to the children of the poor...a bad education and, like the bite of a goanna, it was incurable and ran for years. Ethel Jane (Eve) Langley was born in Forbes on the 1st September 1904. After her father, Arthur died in 1915, her mother, Myra moved her … Continue reading The Pea-Pickers | Eve Langley #AWW
Oh, the existential angst! Remember when you were 22 and you had no idea what you wanted to do or how you fitted into the big, wide world and it all seemed overwhelming, sometimes exciting, but mostly this big, huge, void of trying to be an adult, that you had no idea how to fill. … Continue reading Loner | Georgina Young #AWW
I find reading Helen Garner a curious affair. There's a real push me/pull me effect, that intrigues me and wow's me, then repels me all in the same sentence. I'm intrigued and wowed by her writing, the turn of phrase that captures a moment brilliantly. There's a candour and earthiness that seems grounded in her … Continue reading The Spare Room | Helen Garner #AWW
This remarkable novel, first published to a chorus of acclaim in 1952, is one of the lost classics of Australian literature. Martin Boyd is a deeply humane novelist, a writer of family sagas without peer.Set in Australia and England in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, The Cardboard Crown presents an unforgettable portrait of … Continue reading The Cardboard Crown | Martin Boyd #CCspin
Text Publishing: Tom Hope doesn’t think he’s much of a farmer, but he’s doing his best. He can’t have been much of a husband to Trudy, either, judging by her sudden departure. It’s only when she returns, pregnant to someone else, that he discovers his surprising talent as a father. So when Trudy finds Jesus … Continue reading The Bookshop of the Broken Hearted by Robert Hillman
The profoundly moving new novel from the critically acclaimed and Miles Franklin shortlisted author of PAST THE SHALLOWS and WHEN THE NIGHT COMES. A tender and masterfully told story of memory, family and love. Prague, 1938: Eva flies down the street from her sister. Suddenly a man steps out, a man wearing a hat. Eva runs … Continue reading There Was Still Love by Favel Parrett
City of Trees: Essays on Life, Death and the Need for a Forest by Sophie Cunningham was one of the books I took on holidays a couple of months ago (along with Richard Powers, The Overstory) to Far North Queensland on the edge of the Daintree Rainforest. Both books seemed very appropriate for the occasion. And except … Continue reading City of Trees by Sophie Cunningham
Mirka & Georges: A Culinary Affair is a beautiful book and hard to define. Is it an art book? Is it a biography? Or is it a recipe book? I guess the subtitle that Harding & Morgan chose gives us a clue to their intentions - that food is the central idea around which the … Continue reading Mirka & Georges: A Culinary Affair by Lesley Harding & Kendrah Morgan
