Everyone in This Room Will Someday Be Dead, by Emily Austin

Showing all posts about books

Everyone in This Room Will Someday Be Dead, by Emily Austin

14 September 2021

Gilda, a woman in her late twenties, is a person with a few problems. She has a dread of death. She’s depressed. So much so she can’t deal with washing the dishes, showering, or even turning up for work. Unsurprisingly then she finds herself seeking another job, and is inadvertently hired as a receptionist at a Catholic church.

Everyone in This Room Will Someday Be Dead, by Emily Austin, book cover

But Gilda is not Catholic, nor is she even religious. She is also gay. In addition though to lying about who she is, and pretending to be familiar with the workings of the Church, she also becomes obsessed with her late predecessor, Grace. Certain her passing was no accident, Gilda commences her own investigation into Grace’s death.

Could then Everyone in This Room Will Someday Be Dead, (published by Allen & Unwin, August 2021) possibly have a more apt title? Early reviews for the debut novel of Canadian author Emily Austin look promising. Buzzfeed described it as “the perfect blend of macabre and funny“, while The Skinny found it “funny, dark and harrowing.”

Redhead by the Side of the Road, by Anne Tyler

13 September 2021

Redhead by the Side of the Road, by Anne Taylor, book cover

Now I’m judging books by their titles, but as a redhead, how could I go passed the latest novel by American author Anne Tyler: Redhead by the Side of the Road (published by Penguin Books Australia, 2021). The protagonist, forty-something Micah, is a creature of habit; you could set your watch by his routines.

By day he works as a freelance computer technician, and come evening looks after the apartment block he lives in. He has a woman friend, and turns in each night at ten o’clock. But when his better half tells him she’s about to be evicted from her place, and a teenage boy arrives at the door, saying he’s his son, Micah’s ordered life is plunged into turmoil.

From the little I’ve read about the book so far, it seems there’s no actual redhead character in the story, but best I say no more on the count. Coming in at about one hundred and seventy eight pages, Redhead by the Side of the Road is a shorter read though, which sometimes is exactly what you want.

Some suggested reading for September

9 September 2021

A new-ish month, a new selection of suggested reading from the ABC Arts’ monthly book column. I’m liking the sounds of Things We See in the Light, by Sydney based Australian writer Amal Awad. Set in Sydney’s inner west, and loosely related to two of Awad’s earlier books, it tells the story of Sahar, who returns to Sydney after leaving her husband of eight years in Jordan. But it is an experience Sahar is reluctant to discuss with her friends, even as she becomes ever more settled in Sydney.

RELATED CONTENT

Amal Awad, books, literature, novels

Beautiful World, Where Are You, by Sally Rooney

9 September 2021

Beautiful World, Where Are You (published by Faber/Allen & Unwin) is the third novel by Irish author Sally Rooney. Alice and Eileen are old friends who are young, but not that young. They often exchange long emails as they attempt to put the world to rights, and make sense of their love lives. Alice, a famous novelist, asks Felix, a warehouse worker, to accompany her on a holiday to Rome.

Beautiful World, Where Are You, by Sally Rooney, book cover

Eileen, a literary assistant, who lives in Dublin, has recently ended a relationship and has begun flirting with Simon, an old childhood friend. The two women haven’t seen each other in many years, so when they eventually meet face to face, they find their perceptions of each other – impressions generated by way of their email correspondences – are in sharp contrast to reality.

Oh to be a fly on the wall witnessing that meeting. Beautiful World, Where Are You has been published in two editions. The regular edition sports a blur cover, while the yellow cover book is a special edition hardback with a bonus short story. Another addition to the to-be-read list I think.

The Man From Snowy River was Aboriginal: Anthony Sharwood

8 September 2021

In his new book, The Brumby Wars, Australian journalist and radio and TV presenter Anthony Sharwood contends there is “overwhelming evidence” the subject of Banjo Patterson’s 1890 poem The Man from Snowy River, was Aboriginal.

Patterson’s iconic verse recounts the story of a lone rancher who succeeds in capturing a racehorse who had absconded with a herd of brumbies, or wild horses. Sharwood says only indigenous ranchers worked in the area where the poem is set.

He has studied the topography of the poem: “the pine-covered ridges,” the flint stones, the “ragged and craggy battlements” of Kosciuszko, and says they all point to the location of the poem around Byadbo in the New South. The Welsh side, not the Victorian. Byadbo is the only part of the mountains with “anything remotely resembling pine-covered ridges,” he writes, and the only place with flint rocks and jagged peaks, rather than smooth ones. If the trip happened there, it is an area where all the ranchers were indigenous, he says.

Sharwood believes Patterson presented the rancher as being of European descent to appease the literary tastes of the late nineteenth century.

After Story, by Larissa Behrendt

8 September 2021

In After Story (published by University of Queensland Press, July 2021), the latest novel by Sydney based Australian author Larissa Behrendt, Jasmine, an Indigenous lawyer, is feeling rundown after an intense case. Della, her mother, meanwhile is struggling following the death of her aunt, and a former partner.

Jasmine believes it would do Della – who’s barely ventured beyond the small rural town where she lives – the world of good to go on an overseas holiday. An avid reader, Jasmine has always wanted to see the places where writers such as Jane Austen, and Virginia Woolf lived and worked, so they set off for England.

Jasmine has hopes the holiday will restore the somewhat neglected mother-daughter relationship. However the disappearance of a child in London’s Hampstead Heath, forces Jasmine and Della to relive the trauma the family suffered when Jasmine’s older sister vanished twenty-five years earlier.

I Shot the Devil, by Ruth McIver

7 September 2021

You know what they say about returning to your past, don’t you? Most people think it’s a bad idea. But for Erin Sloane, a crime reporter, the opportunity to write an investigative article about murders committed twenty-years ago, might be the career break she’s looking for. There’s a few problems though.

Erin knew of the two victims, while her father was one of the police officers who originally investigated the crime. Stories of devil worship and satanic killings were rife in the aftermath of the murders, and the case was eventually closed after police laid charges. But was that really the end of the matter?

It seems though Erin doesn’t quite realise how much she’s bitten off, in taking on the story. Dark secrets from the past, including many of hers, stand to be dragged into the light. Such is the premise of I Shot the Devil (published by Hachette Australia, September 2021), by Melbourne based author Ruth McIver.

On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous, by Ocean Vuong

6 September 2021

On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous (published by Penguin Books Australia, 2019), is the debut novel of Vietnamese American writer and poet Ocean Vuong. The story is set around a long letter written by a twenty-something Vietnamese immigrant living in America, nicknamed Little Dog, to his mother, Rose, who is illiterate.

Little Dog’s letter traces his family’s history, prior to his birth, and their relocation to America. He recounts his experiences of being bullied at school, and goes on reveal things his mother did not previously know about him. It is not always a life lived happily though, and domestic violence, racism, and homophobia, are among recurring themes.

Based in part on Vuong’s own life, On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous was named as one of the top ten novels of 2019 by the Washington Post, and was also a finalist in the 2020 PEN/Faulkner Award. The novel is also set to be adapted for the screen, with American filmmaker Bing Liu directing.

Why don’t booksellers suggest more women authors to men?

3 September 2021

Jane Sullivan writing for the Sydney Morning Heralds, asks why book publishers and sellers seem to predominately promote titles written by men to men. Why not the work of more women?

You might argue that booksellers and publishers are only reflecting what the research consistently tells us: while women are prepared to read books by both men and women, far fewer men are prepared to read books by women. Margaret Atwood, for example, is one of the world’s bestselling writers, but only 19 per cent of her readers are men.

If you’re looking for a few suggestions though, I can recommend The Lying Life of Adults, by Elena Ferrante, The Weekend, by Charlotte Wood, How Much of These Hills is Gold, by C Pam Zhang, Picnic at Mount Disappointment, by Melissa Bruce, and The Paper House, by Anna Spargo-Ryan.

RELATED CONTENT

books, novels

Robbie Arnott wins 2021 Age Book of the Year

3 September 2021

Tasmanian writer Robbie Arnott has won the re-booted Age Book of the Year with his 2020 novel The Rain Herron. Congratulations.

« older posts

newer posts »