Last year the winner of the Indie Book of the Year chosen by independent booksellers was Jasper Jones by Craig Silvey. Who will it be this year? Chris Womersley? Bereft has had exceptional crits but the books by Anh Do and Paul Kelly have been extremely popular. The finalists are announced in March.
Fiction
Bereft (Chris Womersley, Scribe)
Indelible Ink (Fiona McGregor, Scribe)
When Colts Ran (Roger McDonald, Vintage)
That Deadman Dance (Kim Scott, Picador)
Non-fiction
The Happiest Refugee (Anh Do, A&U)
How to Make Gravy (Paul Kelly, Hamish Hamilton)
The Well at the World’s End (A J Mackinnon, Black Inc.)
Street Fight in Naples (Peter Robb, A&U)
Debut fiction
Rocks in the Belly (Jon Bauer, Scribe)
Book of Lost Threads (Tess Evans, A&U)
The Legacy (Kirsten Tranter, Fourth Estate)
The Old School (P M Newton, Viking)
Children’s shortlist
Museum of Thieves (Lian Tanner, A&U)
Mirror (Jeannie Baker, Walker Books)
The Very Bad Book (Andy Griffiths & Terry Denton, Pan Macmillan)
The Legend of the Golden Snail (Graeme Base, Viking).
Ada Cambridge is an Australian author of the late 19th century. She was born in Norfolk in 1844 but came to Australia after marrying a clergyman at the age of 26. She lived in many rural towns in Victoria before settling in Melbourne. Like many 19th century women writers she wrote to supplement the family income. Ada was a very popular novelist in her day (she wrote 18 novels and this one The Three Miss Kings was published by Heinemann in the UK in 1891 after being serialised in the Australiasian in 1883) but like many 19th century Australian women writers such as Rosa Praed and “Tasma”, Jessie Couvreur, she is virtually unknown today.
This is a pity because The Three Miss Kings is not only an enjoyable read it also provides a portrait of colonial Melbourne and paints a picture of the mores of daily life at that time. While the novel is essentially a romance, like writers such as Elizabeth Gaskell, Ada also deals with social themes such as philanthropy, religious belief, the role of women, and class – but with a light touch.
The three Miss Kings are: the maternal Elizabeth, the eldest; Patty, outspoken and artistic; and the youngest, the more susceptible, Eleanor. At the outset of the novel they are in their twenties and recently orphaned living in a remote cottage “overlooking a wide bay of the Southern Ocean”. Their parents lived in obscurity but brought up their daughters in a romantic way, steeped in music, foreign languages and the natural world. After their father’s death the sisters determine to make their way in Melbourne on the small amount of money made on the sale of the cottage. Landing in Melbourne by steamer they are initially taken under the wing of Paul Brion, a journalist and the son of the sisters’ solicitor.
Of course it’s “improper” for an unrelated male to involve himself with the women alone so he introduces them to a society matron, Mrs Aarons. Paul is mistaken in his opinion of Mrs Aarons who snobbishly slights the unsophisticated sisters. However at one of Mrs Aarons’ soirees Patty plays the piano and impresses a German maestro. It is here we begin to see there is more to the sisters’ past than meets the eye. Paul also falls for Patty partly through her music – he listens to her playing from the balcony of his rooms which are next door to the modest house where the sisters live.
Also at the soiree is the kind-hearted but overbearing Mrs Duff-Scott. She sees the innate refinement of the sisters and hopes they will becomes the daughters she never had, showering them with fine clothes and introducing them to society.
Historical events of the day provide backdrops to two crucial scenes in the novel. At the procession for the International Exhibition in Melbourne in 1880, Elizabeth becomes separated from her sisters and finds herself crushed by the press of spectators on the Treasury steps only to be saved by the strong arms of Kingscote Yelverton. And at that Australian institution, the Melbourne Cup, the sisters experience a social triumph. Shown to advantage in their special outfits they are universally admired as society beauties, but the Cup is also the scene of a misunderstanding between Patty and Paul that sends their budding romance onto the rocks of despair.
A turning point in the novel occurs when the sisters retreat from the tensions of their obligations to Mrs Duff-Scott and the choices to be made regarding suitors and return to their old home (conveniently bought by Paul’s father – the solicitor). Here a sightseeing trip to the local caves helps Elizabeth make up her mind about Yelverton and a chance discovery in the house leads to an unravelling of threads from the past.
Ada Cambridge sets up an intriguing dichotomy between “natural” worth – innate qualities such as artistic sensibility, sympathy to others, self-awareness – against social values such as wealth, position, custom, and I had hoped this would be developed more fully. However, as Audrey Tate states in her perceptive introduction, “in the earliest chapters the novel appears to be on the verge of developing an exciting feminist theme … but the pressures of society of one’s time are not easily disregarded”.
The novel may end as a conventional romance but Ada’s humour and irony shine through. Like Austen before her she employs a knowing omniscient narrator. When Elizabeth flings her arms around Yelverton’s neck, the narrator comments:
“It is not, I own, what a heroine should have done, whose duty it was to carry a difficulty of this sort through half a volume at least, but I am nevertheless convinced that my real Elizabeth did it, though I was not there to see—standing as she did, within a few inches of her lover, and with nothing to prevent them coming to a reasonable understanding.” p.249
Rachel at Book Snob and Carolyn from A Few of my Favourite Books blog have arranged a Virago Reading Week this week – from 24 Jan to 31 Jan. The idea is to celebrate Virago Modern Classics. Virago was bought up by Little, Brown but still publishes under the Virago imprint. The original company, though, was set up in the seventies to reissue forgotten women writers and publish new ones. The modern classics mostly covers late nineteenth and early to mid-twentieth century writers but a lot of the distinctive dark green-covered “refound” works are now also out of print. The reading week encourages us to scour our bookshelves and search out secondhand book shops to find these books and read them again.
I’m reading The Three Miss Kings by Australian author Ada Cambridge. The novel is set in Victoria in the 1880s and follows three recently orphaned sisters as they leave their beloved farm overlooking the southern ocean and relocate to Melbourne, and who knows, perhaps the world. I suspect they are going to learn a few life lessons in the face of their other-worldly ways and, of course, experience first love and romance. What better way to spend Australia Day than in the company of Ada?
Three stories from The Sleeper’s Almanac 6 were reprinted in The Age last week and are up to read on The Age website. “Tiny Acts of Redistribution” by Samantha Dagg here, “Heirloom” by Fran MacDonald here, “The Doctor” by Terry Donnelly here and Uncle by John Bauer here. Happy Reading!
Shortfire Press in the UK has done what I’ve been advocating for some time and is making new short stories available as electronic downloads. The stories are chosen by the editor Clare Hey and published online only. You can buy each individual story for £0.99 in pdf, mobi or epub format. There are only three stories up there now (the site only went live last week) but more are to come. This is a great initiative – I just have to work out how to get the stories onto my iPad using Stanza. They are not available through iBooks (what is?) – you purchase the stories through the Shortfire website.
Julian Morrow (the host of ABC Radio National Summer Breakfast) is a convert to e-reading so he’s had quite a few segments on ebooks. He appears to be frustrated, like the rest of us, at (1) the price of ebooks in Australia and (2) the lack of availability of the books you want. He also seems perplexed at the nostalgia for print books that is used, whether deliberately or not to, try to stymie the rise of ebooks. In a piece on the “death of the paperback” broadcast this morning he admits to not caring less about the smell, the touch, the look of a print book – he just wants to read something and he’s happy it’s on a screen. The podcast is available here. Also there is a previous segment – “books in a digital age” parts 1 & 2 (with Joel Becker from the Australian Booksellers Association ) available here and here.
In my ongoing quest to find ebooks I actually want to read, I was pleasantly surprised to find Fiona Capp’s book on Judith Wright My Blood’s Country was available in ebook format. Hooray Allen&Unwin but – oh, no – you have to go and find it on one of the 11 ebook seller sites they link off the A&U site. (How come A&U don’t know who’s selling their ebooks?) Anyway off I go tapping away. Surprisingly (or not so surprising she says cynically) those Oz sites you’d expect to stock (store?) an Australian title don’t have it ie Borders, Angus and Robertson, Dymocks and Kobo. Whitcoulls the NZ site didn’t have it either. When I did find the book, the prices were wildly varied (the pbook RRP is $27.99):
Waterstones (UK) £17
Ebooks.com (US) $20
Books on Board (US) $15
Kindle (US) $12
Read Without Paper (Oz) AUD $25
W H Smith (UK) £13.
I suppose to wide variance in price reflects the AUD exchange rate, but the good news is that ebooks can be significantly cheaper than the pbook and available simultaneously with the pbook release (the release date for the Capp pbook was December 2010).
There is a website (www.booko.com.au) that will compare pbook prices for a given title across the range of online sellers. I would be great if this service was extended to ebooks
Last year I decided to dedicate myself to reading a short story a week for a year. That may not seem like much but, although I write short stories myself, they’re not my preferred reading matter and I felt guilty about it – how can I expect other people to read my stories when I don’t read theirs? – so I forced myself into a regime of at least a story a week (see the list of stories I read in 2010 under “Weekly Bread” link at right). After completing the year these are my reflections.
Short stories are hard to find
I had to go out of my way to find short stories to read – I wanted to read both classics and contemporary. I had some collections I’d already purchased such as UTS student anthologies and Best of Australian Stories. I also had the odd collection of short stories on my book shelves (and mostly I hadn’t read these). However, on the whole, I had to search out stories from other sources. I did buy a few collections, mostly anthologies, that I thought had a variety of stories of which I was bound to like some: Jeffrey Eugenides’ My Mistress’s Sparrow is Dead and A S Byatt’s Oxford Book of English Short Stories, were two. The local library was also another obvious place but, as I discovered, short story collections make up a miniscule portion of the fiction holdings, plus they are hard to find being shelved in with the novels. In the end I also scoured the secondhand bookstores for collections to buy.
Contemporary short stories are published in the literary journals but I find these too expensive to buy to read one or two stories. There are hardly any stories published in cheaper sources such as women’s magazines (remember the old days when Woman’s Day and Women’s Weekly regularly ran short stories?). The Big Issue is a notable exception with its regular annual fiction special.
Genre stories are even rarer
Literary stories have outlets in literary journals and the annual short story anthologies, however genre stories don’t appear to have a home. Surely there is as wide a readership for crime/speculative/thriller stories as there is for novels in these genres but this market isn’t catered for as far as I can see. When they do publish stories, genre writers publish them in their own collections – Joanne Harris’ Jigs and Reels, for instance. There is the odd big anthology in the library like the very enjoyable and high quality Penguin Book of Modern Fantasy by Women and Nightshade: 20th Century Ghost Stories, but there are not as many around as I would have expected.
Beware the editors of collections
I thought I’d purchase couple of anthologies and that would give me a head start in having a large number of stories to read. It hadn’t occurred to me before to scrutinise the editors of anthologies – I’d just look at the table of contents and if there was a couple of writers I liked, I might buy the book – but I learnt my lesson when I bought the Oxford Book of Short Stories edited by A S Byatt. Like a lot of people I loved Possession but I’d forgotten how dry and intellectual I found Byatt’s other novels. After sampling a few of the stories in the Oxford book I realised I didn’t see eye to eye with Byatt – I just don’t like the pieces she selected. To compound matters, I experienced the same thing with Jeffrey Eugenides’ collection. It’s supposed to be a collection of love stories but it’s as though Eugenides thought he’d have the last laugh on any sap who bought the book on the strength of the subtitle “great love stories from Chekhov to Munro”. I’d say these are stories that have a relationship at their centre and that’s about all. It’s also American-centric. However it does include an Alice Munro story I’ve wanted to read for some time, the great “The Bear Came Over the Mountain”.
The best of the crop
Reading a lot of short stories from a wide variety of sources concentrated my thoughts on what I actually like about a short story. Unlike a novel I don’t invest so much in a short story so I can afford to read something I might otherwise not read, which is a good thing. On the other hand, lack of investment means it’s easier to give up on one story and move on to another.
On the whole I like a story that is a story, ie has a story arc and enough substance to sink my teeth into. For this reason I thoroughly enjoyed many of the fantasy stories in The Penguin Book of Modern Fantasy by Women especially “The Lake of the Gone Forever” by Leigh Brackett and “The Ship who Sang” by Anne McCaffrey.
I also appreciate beautiful, intricate writing in a short story, writing that might be too rich or tiresome in a longer form. In this category I loved “Bridge of Sighs” by Gail Jones, “The Kiss” by Angela Carter, Ted Hughes’ “The Rain Horse” and Annie Proulx’s quite magnificent “Testament of the Donkey” from her collection Fine Just the Way It Is.
Then there are the uncomfortable, sad themes I might baulk at in a novel such as Peter Goldsworthy’s “Shooting the Dog” and Eva Hornung’s “Life Sentence”.
Stories that hang in my mind and I’m not sure why are: Barbara Hanrahan’s “Tottie Tippet” set in 19th century South Australia and with an unforgettable narrator, the unlikely-named but moving “The Slovenian Giantess” by Penelope Lively, a completely unsettling story by Joyce Cary about a father and his daughters called “Growing Up” that I was amazed to find included in a 1964 anthology meant for schools, and a similarly unnerving story “The Fog Day” by Amy Patterson set in Papua New Guinea.
It was an enlightening experience to read so many stories, and one I’m going to repeat in 2011.
Last year the winner of the Indie Book of the Year chosen by independent booksellers was Jasper Jones by Craig Silvey. Who will it be this year? Chris Womersley? Bereft has had exceptional crits but the books by Anh Do and Paul Kelly have been extremely popular. The finalists are announced in March.
