Margaret Wild & Nina Rycroft: No More Kisses
No More Kisses is the new picture book by Margaret Wild and Nina Rycroft, to be published by Little Hare in April, 2010.
Topics: Childrens books, Margaret Wild, Nina Rycroft | No Comments »
Les Murray: Taller When Prone
A poem from the new collection.
Fame
We were at dinner in Soho
and the couple at the next table
rose to go. The woman paused to say
to me: I just wanted you to know
I have got all your cook books
and I swear by them!I managed
to answer her: Ma’am
they’ve done you nothing but good!
which was perhaps immodest
of whoever I am.
Les Murray’s new volume of poems, Taller When Prone, is to be published in Australia in April, 2010 by Black Inc, and is his first collection since 2006’s The Biplane Houses.
With characteristic grace and dexterity, these poems combine a mastery of form with a matchless ear for the Australian vernacular.
Many evoke rural life – its rhythms and rituals, the natural world, the landscape and the people who have shaped it. There are traveller’s tales, elegies, meditative fragments and satirical sketches.
Above all, there is Murray’s astonishing versatility, on display here at its exhilarating best.
Topics: Les Murray, Poetry | No Comments »
Top Ten Best Book listing for The Reformed Vampire Support Group
Congratulations to Catherine Jinks, whose novel, The Reformed Vampire Support Group, has just been selected by the prestigious American Library Association as one of the 2010 Top Ten Best Books for Young Adults.
Topics: Catherine Jinks, Young Adult | No Comments »
Trudie Trewin & Cheryl Orsini: Wibbly Wobbly Street
The cover of Wibbly Wobbly Street, by Trudie Trewin and Cheryl Orsini, a picture book to be published by Scholastic Australia in May, 2010.
Topics: Cheryl Orsini, Childrens books | No Comments »
Kate Jennings: Trouble: Selected Writings 1970-2010
The cover for Kate Jennings’s new book, Trouble: Selected Writings 1970-2010, which is to be published by Black Inc. in 2010.
In 1970 Kate Jennings, 21, stunned a Sydney anti-war rally with a pull-no-punches speech that put “women’s lib” on the map. Brave, impassioned and searingly sarcastic, the speech set the tone for the idiosyncratic career that was to follow.
A few years later, she was on her way to New York, where she would make her name as a writer and enjoy a ringside seat at some of the most confronting events of our times.
Trouble collects Jennings’s best work from the last four decades. With a polemical anger tempered by a keen sense of the absurd and a fiercely independent streak, she writes incisively about politics, morality, finance, feminism and the writing life.
She describes America with the keen eye of an outsider and looks back at Australia with an expatriate’s frankness.
Trouble is both an unconventional autobiography and a record of remarkable times. From the protest movements of the 1970s, via Wall Street’s heyday and dramatic collapse, to the historic election of Barack Obama, Jennings captures the shifts – seismic and subtle, personal and political – that brought us to where we are now.
After four decades, Kate Jennings’ work is as exhilarating and impossible to categorise – shocking with the shock of recognition – as the day it was written.
‘An extraordinary writer’ – Shirley Hazzard
‘Piercing, intellectually rigorous and scrupulously honest, no-holds-barred writing has been Kate Jennings’s trademark.’ – Elliot Perlman
Topics: Essays, Kate Jennings | No Comments »
Laura Bloom: In the Mood
The beautiful cover for Laura Bloom’s novel, In the Mood, which is to be published by Viking/ Penguin Australia in February, 2010.
It’s February 1946, and Robert Booker is just home from the war. Home is a pretty weather-board house in Summer Hill, where his wife, Catherine, is waiting.
They haven’t seen each other for three years, yet they are separated by so much more than time.
Robert is haunted by the battlefields of New Guinea, and Catherine harbours the guilt of her affair with a charismatic US Marine – and other secrets too painful to confront.
Her heart divided between two men, Catherine finds herself longing for all she has lost.
With all that’s changed between them, can Catherine and Robert find their way back to each other again?
Set in post war Sydney, this is a heart-wrenching, evocative novel about love and work, fidelity, betrayal and intimacy.
Topics: Laura Bloom, Novels | 1 Comment »
Les Murray: Killing the Black Dog
Killing the Black Dog is Les Murray’s courageous account of his struggle with depression, accompanied by poems specially selected by the author.
Since the first edition appeared in 1997, hosts of readers have drawn insight from his account of the disease, its social effects and its origins in his family’s history.
As Murray writes in this revised and updated edition, the title was premature. He had mistaken a remission for a cure, and thought himself freed from the severe depressive illness which had twice invaded his life.
Now, in a new afterword, he describes a relapse, but also shares some of the fruits of his further contemplation.
He shows gratitude for help previously unacknowledged, and describes how patches of daylight now balance out those of darkness in his life.
A further half-dozen poems have been added, reflecting a more complex understanding of depression and its role in the lives of its sufferers.
Topics: Les Murray, Poetry | No Comments »
Catherine Jinks: The Genius Wars
The Genius Wars, the final novel in Catherine Jinks’s internationally successful Genius Trilogy, is to be published by Allen & Unwin on October 26 2009.
In a thrilling conclusion to the Genius Trilogy, Cadel must think like a criminal mastermind.
After abandoning a life of lies and mistrust, fifteen-year-old Cadel has finally found his niche. He has a proper home, good friends and loving parents. He’s even studying at university.
But he’s still not safe from Prosper English, who’s now a fugitive from justice and determined to smash everything that Cadel has struggled to build.
When Cadel’s nearest and dearest are threatened, he must launch an all-out attack on the man he once viewed as his father.
Can he track down Prosper before it’s too late?
And what rules will they both have to break in the process?
Topics: Catherine Jinks, Young Adult | 2 Comments »
‘A Great Write Hope in the City of Sharks’
The Tower by Michael Duffy (Allen & Unwin, $29.99). Reviewed by Winsor Dobbin
Sydney Sun-Herald
For a nation that is obsessed by crime stories and whose denizens avidly devour thrillers written by overseas authors – largely British and American – Australia has surprisingly few top-notch writers of the genre.
Despite this being his debut novel, Michael Duffy can comfortably be added to a list of contemporary standouts that includes Peter Temple, Peter Corris, Barry Maitland and J. R. Carroll.
Duffy’s background as a newspaper crime reporter shines through in a fast-moving thriller that could have been drawn from today’s headlines as it canvasses corruption in high places, police incompetence and the smuggling of illegal immigrants.
Duffy’s young homicide detective, Nick Troy, is a good man who loves his work – often to the detriment of his family life.
Just as Troy’s marriage is hanging by a thread, he is thrust into the heart of an investigation into the death of a rich and powerful woman from the building site of what will be the world’s tallest skyscraper.
Topics: Fiction, Michael Duffy, Novels | No Comments »
Natalie Jane Prior: The Minivers on the Run
The cover for Natalie Jane Prior’s The Minivers on the Run, which is to be published by Marion Lloyd at Scholastic UK in February, 2010.
Topics: Childrens books, Natalie Jane Prior | No Comments »
