Thoughts on books and writing
The image of Carmel Bird’s Child of the Twilight is from a work by Victorian photo-artist Samantha Everton. Vogue Living describes her work as: Everton now shoots her magic realist worlds while approaching her art as a director might visualise a theatrical film set. The images slide the viewer into a hyper-real colour-saturated world.
Beautiful.
The shortlist in the Best Designed Literary Fiction Book category includes: (Plus The China Garden see previous post)
For general fiction best book design are (plus American Rust which I’m not incuding):
A True History of the Hula Hoop, Ransom and Valley of Grace are the fiction finalists for Best Designed Cover.
I think the Andrew McGahan cover is lovely and I also like Good to a Fault which stands out in the bookshop but I can see Ransom has a wonderful simplicity as does The China Garden. We await the results!
The shortlist is announced in April and the winner in June.
The China Garden by Kristina Olsson has won the 2010 Barbara Jefferis Award ($35,000) for ‘the best novel written by an Australian author that depicts women and girls in a positive way or otherwise empowers the status of women and girls in society’.
UQP notes: When her mother dies, Laura returns to her coastal hometown. At the reading of the will, Laura discovers that her mother had a child that she adopted out. She also bequeathed a painting to someone who is a stranger to Laura. These revelations completely shift Laura’s understanding of her mother. Her life becomes entangled with the lives of Cress, an older and respected member of the community, Kieran, Cress’ intellectually disabled grandson, and Abby, a teenaged girl who has become friends with Kieran.
The judges said: ‘The title refers to Angela’s garden and its broken pieces of china. This evocative image suggests that beauty can be created from what is broken and apparently irretrievable, but also the danger and sharpness of buried secrets. … Without feeling the need to resolve every absence or mystery, Olsson gently suggests that it is always possible to make new things out of the past, however fractured or painful.’
The other finalists were: The Lost Life, Steven Carroll, Swimming, Enza Gandolfo, The World Beneath Cate Kennedy and Headlong, Susan Varga.
The Owl Killers by Karen Maitland, Michael Joseph 2009
The Owl Killers is a medieval thriller set in the early thirteen hundreds in a small village in South East England. Into this closed world where Christianity and paganism are in uneasy co-existence, come a group of Beguines from Bruges. They set up a community of women on land they have inherited near the village. Not surprisingly when disease and famine beset the village, the Beguine women are easily demonised as causing the misfortune. Despite fearing the women the villagers still surreptitiously bring their sick to the Beguinage, under the cover of night, to be healed. To complicate matters a fraternity of masked “Owl Masters” terrorise and extort from the villagers, and there is evidence that a pagan monster called the Owlman is preying on victims in the area.
The story is told through the points of view of five characters: Servant Martha the leader of the Beguines, a morally compromised priest, Father Ulfrid, Agatha the disgraced daughter of the local landowner who joins the Beguines, Beatrice, another of the Beguines, and a small village girl, Pisspuddle. The device of five different voices allows Maitland to build up the story from both the villagers’ side and from point of view of the Beguines, withholding vital pieces of information along the way to keep the reader guessing.
The novel has fantasy elements — the flesh-ripping Owlman, a “witch” with second sight, a wild forest girl who can control the weather — but these are explainable by the superstitious beliefs of the time. Maitland is also adept at portraying medieval life in all its smelly, gory detail. From this mixture she weaves a fast-paced, tense, intriguing story. It might get bogged down in places with too many strands in play but for the most part I couldn’t put the book down. The Owl Killers will appeal to historical fiction fans who like their stories dark and to fantasy buffs who don’t mind a dose of reality.