The Sentence (published by Hachette Australia, November 2021), written by Minnesota based American author Louise Erdrich, is a book set in a bookshop. A bookshop with a difference though. The independent bookshop, also located in Minnesota, is haunted by a ghost. And not any old ghost either. No, the shop has become the afterlife abode of Flora, who happened to be the store’s most irritating customer during her (regular) lifetime.
Now she’s back, and back to stay, unless a way can be found to get rid of her. To this shop comes Tookie, a new employee, who’s recently been released from prison after serving a ten year sentence. She’s looking for stability and normality in her life, and has even gone so far as to marry, Pollux, the now former police officer who originally arrested her many years earlier.
Set during a turbulent chapter in the city’s recent history, with Black Lives Matter protests, and the Covid pandemic, Tookie learns she has one year to somehow extricate Flora from the shop. But Tookie has her work cut out for her. The intentions of Flora, who must have a few scores she wants to settle, soon move from the annoying to the sinister…
Licorice Pizza (trailer), directed by American filmmaker Paul Thomas Anderson, seems like the sort of holiday fun many people are looking forward to. The coming-of-age comedy drama starring Alana Haim and Cooper Hoffman, along with Bradley Cooper, Sean Penn, and Maya Rudolph, among others, is set to open in Australian cinemas on Boxing Day, 26 December 2021.
A rugged coastline. A treacherous, turbulent, ocean. An air current so deadly locals call it the black wind. A remote village, home to the Dempsey family for generations. A family who has a made a name and livelihood for themselves as fishers and drug dealers. And then there are the names. Mackerel. Ahab. Blackbeard. It’s a nautical blend of ingredients indeed.
Such is the setting for The Deep (published by Penguin Books Australia, July 2021) the second novel of Burnie, Tasmania, based Australian writer Kyle Perry. But the inhabitants of Shacktown, on the Tasman Peninsula, wake to a troubling mystery one day. A young relative of the Dempsey’s, Forest, who disappeared seven years earlier, aged six, and long assumed to be dead, along with his parents, Jesse and Alexandra, has inexplicably appeared on a nearby beach.
A cross tattooed onto Forest’s back suggests he has been in the captive custody of Blackbeard, a rival drug lord who is intent on muscling into the illicit Dempsey family operation. But Mackerel and Ahab are reluctant to help the family deal with Blackbeard. Mackerel is on prison release, and any misstep will see him incarcerated again, while Ahab wants to turn his back on the family’s shady business ventures…
Australian book retailer Dymocks have unveiled the shortlist for their 2021 Book of the Year award. Titles to make the cut include Apples Never Fall by Liane Moriarty, Who Gets to be Smart by Bri Lee, and one of the inspirations behind the name of this very website, Klara and the Sun, by Kazuo Ishiguro. The winner will be announced later in November.
Sometimes I find the synopsis of a book so intriguing I feel compelled to write about it for that reason alone. Cloud Cuckoo Land (published by Simon & Schuster, 2021), written by American author Anthony Doerr, is such a novel. The first point of interest are the settings. Constantinople, now Istanbul, in past times the capital of several large empires, is one.
Here a teenage girl called Anna lives, in the lead up to the fateful 1453 siege of the city, and final remnant of the Byzantine Empire. In her spare time, she reads a book, the story of Aethon, a man who yearned to become a bird, so he could fly to a better place. The next setting is five hundred years later, in Idaho, where Zona, a woman in her eighties, is preparing a group of children to take part in a play based on Aethon’s story. The final setting is somewhere in interstellar space, where Konstance, a resident born on a generational colony ship, is transcribing the story of Aethon, after he father recited it to her.
And here we come to the second point of interest, an ancient story that links people living centuries apart, people keeping – in their own way – Aethon and his story alive, many centuries after its original telling. While the nature of the story appeals to me, like any book, it’s not for everyone, if the comments of some GoodReads members are anything to go by.
Burning (trailer) is a documentary by Los Angeles based Australian filmmaker Eva Orner about the Black Summer bush fires that ravaged parts of Australia in 2019 and 2020. The two-minute trailer is shocking, but being in the path of the flames must have been terrifying. Burning is scheduled for release later this month.
As any book lover knows, walking into a bookshop and being confronted with hundreds (if not thousands) of books to choose from can be overwhelming. It is also one of the best feelings in the world. The Readings Prize shortlist is here to help narrow the field a little, to encourage readers to pick up a book by a first- or second-time author they don’t know and to give it a try.
The Readings is an award that focuses on newly published authors, a few more prizes like this are needed.
Willis Wu imagines he is an extra in a TV crime show. But he aspires to be more than an insignificant figure lurking in the background, he has his eye on a lead role. Kung Fu Guy would be ideal, but he can’t seem to break out of the part he has become typecast in, that of Generic Asian Man. Is it possible his Taiwanese Chinese ancestry is working against him?
The TV show, named Black and White – the lead characters are police officers, one is black, the other white – plays out in a restaurant called Golden Palace, located in the Chinatown of an American city. It might be though Willis is actually a restaurant worker who imagines he is part of a TV show. But in Interior Chinatown (published by Allen & Unwin, January 2021), the fourth novel by American author Charles Yu, the distinction isn’t really relevant.
Behind the screenplay, or the would-be cop-show, is a story of immigration and assimilation. Of people who leave their homeland and relocate to a new country. A place where their appearance, and the language they speak, may set them apart. See them sometimes relegated to the fringes of society. This may not be a TV show many of us want to be cast in…
They’re making it easy on us this month, ABC literary writers and reviewers have suggested just five books for our reading consumption this month. Mind you, we’re already a week into the eleventh month, meaning we’ve lost eight reading days, so that might be a small problem. Anyway, I’m liking the look and sound of Byobu, by Ida Vitale, a 98 year old Uruguayan author, although Byobu was actually published in 2004 when she was eighty. Never let anyone say you’re too old to start a career as a writer.
