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Regardless of how deeply Caro looks within for answers, what she never does is apologise. There’s absolutely no shame here—not of her mental health issues, her parenting, her outspokenness, her relationship choices, her political affiliations, her atheism, her engagement in public conversation or her career choices. By not apologising, even as she shares her worst mistakes, Caro encourages her readers to show compassion to themselves.
The A to Z of Normal, by British author Helen Barbour, is a “relationship novel,” but has more to say than a romance, or a “chick lit” book. Readers like to learn while being entertained, and in this novel, Ms. Barbour gently educates us about Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder and deserves praise for recognizing the dramatic potential in a subject seldom-explored in fiction.
Vickie Hutchins and Jo Ann Martin’s Busy Day Slow Cooking is a lay-flat-when-opened book packed with great recipes, homey notes and hints. Readers are offered opportunity to have one of their own favorite recipes featured in the next cookbook offered by the duo. The first page is one to be used for writing a trusted recipe, prize offered is a free copy of the cookbook in which the recipe is placed.
Lianne La Havas—a British girl of Jamaican and Greek heritage (her Greek father was a musician)—has been a part of music scenes large and small (associated at one time or another with Paloma Faith, Bon Iver, Alicia Keys, and Prince); and her work has won her critical respect and popularity. Yet, though young, recognized, and rewarded, there she has had to fight for her integrity.
In this special “on location” Sydney Writers Festival show, Vivian Gornick reads from and talks about the writing of her latest book The Odd Woman and the City, about the nature (and freedom) of “oddness”, about the joy and vitality…
I caught up with Marie Darrieussecq at the Sydney Writers Festival and we talked about such things as her latest novel Men, her characters Solange and Kouhouesso, on the glitz of the city and being an outsider, on passion vs love, her research process, on finding the right voice, and lots more.
Solange’s journey is one that takes her into her own heart of darkness, where she finds her limitations, her humiliations and restrictions, and the cultural, political, gendered and racial stereotypes through which she has defined herself. Throughout the novel she begins to unravel these, unwinding herself slowly until she is temporarily removed altogether as subject.
It takes strength of character to pursue, and create, human wretchedness in all its shapes for 360 pages. Like many unreliable narrators before him, Norman K ranges from obnoxious to villainous in his pretension, and The Diary of Norman K shows how uniquely we puts on airs, down to a style of speech best described by his “friend” Russell as “an Elizabethan aristocrat who had just woken up from a two-hundred-year coma.
Author and scultor Dimitrios Ikonomou reads from his new novel The Diary of Norman K, and chats with Justin Goodman about his book and its origins, his characters, on having an unreliable narrator on an unreliable journey, on meta-fiction, on…