Given our November meeting - and selecting our schedule for the first half of the year - is around the corner, here is a list of some recommendations for our schedule, in addition to those in the sidebar (which, currently, is misbehaving in terms of my ability to easily edit!)
Includes recommendations from Deb, Anne, Helen, Denise, Celeste, Marie, Sue ...
Some older Aussies available from Text Publishing
- Martin Boyd's A cardboard crown: the first in his trilogy based on him and his family, a genuine classic for us!
- Madeleine St John's The essence of the thing (from the author of The women in black, this is the first Aussie author's novel to be shortlisted for the Booker Prize, I believe. 1997)
- Cory Taylor's Me and Mr Booker: won the now-defunct Commonwealth Book Prize in 2012.
- Amy Witting's Isobel on the way to the corner shop: or any of hers; we did her A change in the lighting many eons ago. Won The Age Book of the Year in 2000.
Non-Aussie classics
- Wilkie Collins' The women in white (1859): the first crime/mystery novel (but nearly 700p.)
- Chaim Potok's The chosen: American classic, 1967, abut respecting difference.
- Elizabeth von Arnim's Vera: the Australian-born but really British author of The enchanted April. Barbara Pym said her books are "a revelation in their wit and... dry, unsentimental treatment of the relationship between men and women"; the director of The enchanted April film said "Von Arnim didn't have much patience with the male ego, and she didn't have much more for the women who bowed beneath it".
Recent(ish) fiction
- Larissa Behrendt, After story: First Nations writer, a mother-daughter story involving a literary tour of England, but also a past tragedy
- Damon Galgut's The promise: 2021 Booker Prize winner, supported by a few in the group on WhatsApp. (304pp.)
- Irma Gold's The breaking: local author, who has attended a meeting before with her Canberra anthology, The invisible thread.
- Hannah Kent's Devotion: new book by author of Burial rites.
- Kazuo Ishiguro's Klara and the sun: about AI
- Ingrid Persaud's Love after love: set in Trinidad; NY Times says "Great books about love, like this one, feel like precious and impossible gifts. We should cherish the writers who provide them."
- Francis Spufford's Light perpetual: longlisted for the 2021 Booker Prize, WW2 story.
- Amor Towles' The Lincoln Highway: NY Times bestseller, and author of A gentleman in Moscow. (nearly 600 pp.)
- Ida Vitale's Byobu: translated novella from a Uruguayan poet, first published in 2004 and her first translated into English.
- Sarah Winman's Still life: Set btn Florence and London's East End from WW11 thru to the 80s, about friendship making family, and lots of "yummy Italianness". (over 450pp.)
Some nonfiction
- Candida Baker's Heart of a horse: life lessons from horses and other animals: new Australian nonfiction by journalist Baker who moved to Byron Bay (320pp.)
- Raynor Winn's The salt path: memoir about a couple, the husband terminally ill, walking the South West Coast Path, from Somerset to Dorset, via Devon and Cornwall (over 600 miles) (288pp.)
