Booklist - Australian Contemporary Literary Fiction

If you like Australian fiction here are some authors that you might like to read.

 

Australian Contemporary Literary Fiction

Brooks, Geraldine

Carey, Peter

Carroll, Steven

De Kretser, Michelle

Drewe, Robert

Flanagan, Richard

Garner, Helen

Grenville, Kate

Halligan, Marion

Hartnett, Sonya

Hospital, JanetteTurner

Jones, Gail
Keneally, Thomas

London, Joan

McGahan, Andrew

Malouf, David

Miller, Alex

Perlman, Elliot

Scott, Kim

Tsiolkas, Christos

Winton, Tim

#MWF14 Mothers Grimm

This post was written by Lisa from Kew Library. 

This session with Cassandra Golds and Danielle Wood looked at the power and role of fairytales and how they tell us about love but also reveal the dark side of life - hatred, jealousy, poverty and betrayal thus using the language of fairytales to talk about the profound. Cassandra's latest book Pureheart is about what it means to love and is inspired by Rapunzel and the Arthurian legends. Danielle's latest is Mothers Grimm in which she refashions four traditional tales and transforms them into black comedies in the present.

 

NAIDOC week booklist - Aboriginal authors to read

To celebrate NAIDOC week we compiled a list of some excellent books both fiction and nonfiction by Indigenous authors that you might like to read.

Larissa Behrendt author of Home which won several awards and Legacy  her first novel which is about a young Aboriginal woman's complex relationship with her father.


Tony Birch a Melbourne author has written Father's Day, Shadowboxing and Blood which was shortlisted for the Miles Franklin Award in 2012.  Tony tells riveting stories with strong characters.


Kevin Gilbert a poet, playwright, printmaker and photographer he is most famous for The Cherry Pickers a play that became an important symbol for Aboriginal activists.

Anita Heiss is the author of several books both fiction and nonfiction.  Her latest book is Am I black enough for you? She is also a National Ambassador for the National Year of Reading.


Kate Howarth author of Ten Hail Marys : a memoir which tells the story of Kate's early life as she is abandoned by her mother only to become pregnant at 15 and is sent to a home for unwed mothers.  Kate has an amazing gift for storytelling.


Sally Morgan wrote the classic biography My place told in three parts about different members of Sally's family.  It was one of the first books written by an Indigenous person.

Kim Scott has written three novels - True country, Benang from the heart which won the Miles Franklin award in 2000 making him the first Aboriginal person to win that award.  He won again in 2011 with That deadman dance. Kim explores the lives of light-skinned Aboriginal people and his books are somewhat autobiographical.

Tara June Winch wrote Swallow the air a novel about family, growing up and how these connect to complex social issues.  It was nominated and won for several awards.


Alexis Wright broke onto the Australian literature scene with Carpentaria, winning the Miles Franklin award in 2007. Carpentaria tells a modern story of a fictional Aboriginal clan and the conflict they face.

Book review - Sacred Hearts, by Sarah Dunant

How do you choose what to read next? Some titles jump off the shelf, don't they? Others are recommended. Then there are those worthy books you feel you really must read. But, after that, how do you actually choose from all the thousands of titles out there?

When you are a librarian the pressure is worse. We advise others on their choice of reading material. To this end, we read reviews, listen to author interviews, and attend festivals, keeping our ears to the polished linoleum of the publishing world.

Here at City of Boroondara, we have another secret weapon and here today, I am going to reveal it to you.

It's called shelving time.

If you are a regular user of this library service, you will have noticed that our staff shelve for forty five minutes twice a day. If you have been around for a quite a while, you may have seen one of us, a book open, eyes focussed, our black shelving trolley all but forgotten. This is the power of shelving time. If you stick around long enough, you will notice some of those books don't get shelved. They stay on our trolleys. At the end of the day, they are carried out of the door in bulging library bags.

This is how I found Sacred Hearts, by Sarah Dunant.  I had read reviews and interviews about Dunant's work. I knew she was an international best-selling author of historical fiction, my favourite genre, that her work was experimental in its treatment of time and space - and edgy in its use of multiple plots and viewpoints. But for some reason, I had never got round to reading any of it.

Until recently.

I am not sure what drew my eye this time. The Nun on the cover, perhaps? I'll be confess, I have a weakness for convent books. To my mind, they fall into the same category as the boarding school books, I read as a child. I always wanted to go to boarding school - I blame Enid Blyton for that entirely. And though I have never had any desire to be a nun, there is also something about the cloistered world that holds a fascination for me. 

I opened the cover and read the historical note:

'By the second half of the sixteenth century, the price of wedding dowries had risen so sharply within Catholic Europe that most noble families could not afford to marry off more than one daughter. The remaining young women were dispatched - for a much lesser price - into convents. Historians estimate that in the great towns and city states of Italy, up to half of all noble women became nuns.

'Not all of them went willingly ...

Okay, she had me. A convent, a young woman ripped from an illicit love affair, a scholarly nun who runs a dispensary (shades of Brother Cadfael). I decided to give it a try. Here is how it starts:  those few paragraphs, you can see some of the major themes emerging - motherhood, sexuality, genius, suffering and the political manoeuvrings of the counter-reformation church. Once I started Sacred Hearts, it was difficult to it down. The characters were likeable, the situation credible, and the outcome although maybe not completely realistic, was very satisfying. I will be keeping an eye out for Sarah Dunant's other books during shelving time.
Written by Liz Corbett.