Thursday 27 March 2014

INDIE Awards 2014 ~ WINNERS

The Indie Awards 2014 books at Abbey's Bookshop 131 York Street, Sydney

The Narrow Road to the Deep North by Richard Flanagan has been crowned as the Independent Booksellers of Australia favourite Australian book from last year and the winner of The Indie Book of the Year Award 2014. The individual category winners in Fiction, Debut Fiction, Non-Fiction and Children’s were also announced. From these four category winners the independent booksellers selected the best of the best - The Indie Book of the Year for 2014.

Upon announcement, Richard Flanagan said; " If there is a motif for my novel it is the circle, and it seems fitting that a book whose public life began with me speaking about it at the Leading Edge conference last year now sees me return here to thank you, the independent booksellers, for this award.

2013 was a golden year for Australian books. Across fiction, non-fiction, and children’s books there were so many outstanding works that sold in record numbers. In what is in many ways a time of despair and difficulty for those in the world of books, I want to thank Australian independent bookshops not only for this award but for making this small miracle possible.

Good Australian writing needs good Australian bookshops to prosper. Without them Australian writers are one more endangered species whose bush has been bulldozed. That we have not only survived, but shown that Australian writing remains popular and profitable is a great achievement that deserves celebration.

And for that the real prize goes to all the Australian independent booksellers who backed not only me with such passion and such commitment, but who have backed so many Australian writers. I am grateful for this prize, but I am indebted for that support. Without it I—and so many others— would not be writers. Ponder, for a moment, what Australia would be without Australian books. That they continue to be written is as much your achievement as it is our vocation. Thank you."

According to Galina Marinov, Buyer/Marketing Manager, Leading Edge Books, “As with all great literature, this is a book that can be read on many levels - a deeply moving novel of one man’s life, a devastatingly beautiful love story, a harrowing historical narrative daring us never to forget and most of all, as an ode to the resilience of the human spirit. All this makes it a dream book in the hands of independent booksellers – to read, to love and to recommend wholeheartedly to their customers.” 

The category award winners are:

BEST FICTION:
The Narrow Road to the Deep North by Richard Flanagan (Random House)

BEST NON-FICTION:
Girt by David Hunt (Black Inc) 

BEST DEBUT FICTION:
Burial Rites by Hannah Kent (Pan Macmillan) 

BEST CHILDREN’S:
Kissed by the Moon by Alison Lester (Penguin) 

THE INDIE BOOK OF YEAR 2014 - The Narrow Road to the Deep North by Richard Flanagan (Random House) 



Buy these books at Abbey's (131 York Street Sydney) ~ An Aladdin's cave for readers

Abbey's ~ An Aladdin's cave for readers

Friday 7 March 2014

Notes from Eve Abbey - March 2014


There are plenty of aspiring writers around now that so many people have word processing in their computers. Let me suggest a shining example to you.

 Anne Patchett
Photo credit: Heidi Ross

Ann Patchett’s latest book, This is the Story of a Happy Marriage, is billed as a memoir although it is also a collection of non-fiction pieces which have appeared in such places as Vogue, The Wall Street Journal, The New York Times or The Atlantic Monthly.

They all recall encounters in her life, whether it be about work, separation, divorce, love or friendships. They are all a joy to read while the opening piece, called Non-Fiction: An Introduction could be a manifesto for a would-be writer. And of course the final piece about setting up a bookshop in her home town is not to be missed! Ann Patchett is what may be called a jobbing writer.... she speaks directly to you about all sort of things and can turn her hand to any subject. Her work is totally pleasing and often very amusing. Her most famous book is Bel Canto about a terrorist attack on a President who has stayed home to watch his favourite TV show whilst The Magician’s Assistant and State of Wonder are also popular. Her versatile approach to writing reminds me of our own wonderful Ruth Park.


 Penelope Fitzgerald: A Life by Hermione Lee

Word processor help was certainly not around when great English writer Penelope Fitzgerald was writing her spare little masterpieces. Look inside the front and back covers of Hermione Lee’s wonderful new biography Penelope Fitzgerald: A Life. These are copied from manuscripts and are covered in deletions and scribbles. I suppose someone else eventually typed them?

Fitzgerald came from a famous clan of bishops and intellectuals. She wrote about them in her book The Knox Brothers, and also a biography of Edward Burne-Jones. She remained an ardent member of the Morris Society all her life. She liked to pose as a vague old lady but she was certainly not that. Her novels were first published at sixty and she was famous by eighty. My favourite book is, naturally, The Bookshop which ends something like this, "she sighed as she thought she lived in a town which didn't want a bookshop". Her last book, The Blue Flower, is called a work of genius. The biography, like Fitzgerald’s stories, is both sad and funny.

After her brilliant academic career she married a dashing Irish Guardsman who turned out to be a lost soul much given to drink. As editors of The World Review they were part of the literati in Hampstead. The World Review was one of the many magazines published by the Hulton Library which also included Lilliput. (Who remembers that?) Desmond Fitzgerald was supposed to be the editor and Penelope was also a regular contributor to BBC Script – which were often late as she worked with Desmond on the Review. Things go downhill rapidly and they end up on a sinking barge on the Thames which she writes about in Offshore (which won the Booker Prize in 1979).

After Desmond’s death Penelope becomes a valued teacher at some unusual schools in London, such as a college for future actors which she writes about in At Freddies. Lucky pupils! Just as this biography will be a treasure-trove for teachers and students of English literature as Hermione Lee spends a lot of time dissecting the novels.

As she grew older and more famous – listed three times for the Booker Prize and winning once – Fitzgerald spent more time writing essays and reviews as well as appearing on panels and as a judge. If you haven't already read Penelope Fitzgerald I am sure you will want to but if you have already read her I am also sure you will want to re-read her wonderful insightful novels.

Hermione Lee is a famous biographer and teacher of literature who has also written about Virginia Woolf, Elizabeth Bowen, Philip Roth, Willa Cather and Edith Wharton, so you might say she has the literary world covered.

Talking of aspiring writers... Australian Book Review has announced the closing date for the Elizabeth Jolley Short Story Prize. It will be 1st May 2014 and details can be found on www.australianbookreview.com.au

Keep well,

Eve

Buy these books at Abbey's (131 York Street Sydney) ~ An Aladdin's cave for readers

Abbey's ~ An Aladdin's cave for readers

Lindy Jones has been reading...


Lindy Jones ~ Australian Bookseller Association Bookseller of the Year 2011

The Sixth Extinction by Elizabeth Kolbert

ABBEY'S CHOICE MARCH 2014 - SCIENCE

Elizabeth Kolbert

Since life began on Earth, there have been five major mass extinctions: the Ordovician 450 million years ago; the late Devonian 375 million years ago; the Permian 250 million years ago; the Triassic-Jurassic 200 million years ago; and the Cretaceous 65 million years ago. Here in the Anthropocene (a name still being investigated as appropriate to describe the current epoch), we are perhaps in the midst of the Sixth Extinction that our race is instrumental in causing.

Kolbert is a journalist, rather than a scientist, but her ability to communicate scientific concepts is evident in this accessible and highly researched book. It blends history with cutting edge discoveries; it has a good overview of the development of the ideas of evolution and species dispersal, of the gradual understanding of the length of life on the planet.

Each chapter is arranged around the story of one species emblematic of an idea or problem, including: the Panamanian golden frog and the discovery of the devastating chytrid fungus; the idea of extinction as arrived at through the examination of mastodon fossils; coral and the acidification of the seas; the fragmentation of rainforest as told through a single tree species and the repercussions of climate change; or the desperate plight of American bats and a plague perhaps introduced by travellers visiting a tourist cave system.

In all of these things, human actions are the essential agency of change. It is perhaps hard to use the word ‘enjoyable’ when the subject is so terrifying, but I found this book absorbing and thoughtful, and it makes me want to read more on various subjects Kolbert covers – a sign that the book has engaged and stimulated in equal measure!


 The Enchanted by Rene Denfield

ABBEY'S CHOICE MARCH 2014 - FICTION

Rene Denfeld

A prisoner on death row watches and listens to what happens around him. We don’t know what he’s done, because he can’t face it himself. He hears The Lady try to make sense of one of his fellow inmate’s life and actions in an attempt to save him from execution; he sees The Priest lost in the maze of good intentions and diminishing faith; he watches the beginnings of something fragile between them. The prisoner shrinks from any contact, but reading and re-reading brings colour to his cell – that and the Horses.

Language is the enchantment in his dark world, and as the story unfolds, if we do not and can not condone, we come to understand the prisoner’s life. A powerful book best consumed in one sitting, then thought about quietly long afterwards.



Alice Hoffman

Coralie has been brought up by her slightly sinister father to impersonate a mermaid in his Museum of Extraordinary Things – a freak show on Coney Island in the early years of the 20th century. She is kept separate from human society to preserve the illusion of her otherness, but as the nature of mass entertainment changes, her father looks for different attractions. He also displays her in less innocent circumstances, as his business declines…

Eddie is a young man who rejects his Jewish background and feels betrayed by what he perceives as his father’s weakness. He becomes intrigued by photography, and when he witnesses a terrible tragedy, finds himself embroiled in both cover-ups and mysteries.

How these two disparate characters find each other and their true place in the world is a riveting and beautifully detailed read.

TaraShea Nesbit

It took me a few chapters to get into this novel, as it is narrated by a collective chorus of voices – the wives of the men involved in the Project at Los Alamos during WWII. Once I had gotten used to the multiplicity of storytellers, I found this thoroughly interesting. The women have come from all over the country, kept ignorant of their husbands’ works and dealing with life in an isolated and isolating place.

From the difficulties of maintaining their families, the jealousies and friendships and hardships of living in a town constructed for one purpose, the need to maintain secrecy and something of their own lives and the many and varied ways they coped (or didn’t) this is an admirable exercise in evoking place and time and experience.




Robert Glancy

Frank has been involved in a very bad accident. He doesn’t remember very much of his past life as a husband, employee in the family law firm (where there was none better at dealing with the fine print of contracts) and is being told who he was by his wife, his older brother and various acquaintances.

It’s rather puzzling though, the things he does remember don’t quite seem to fit with the pictures other people make of him and for him. And what is his younger brother trying to tell him in the strange and entertaining emails he keeps sending? As Frank’s past life gradually comes back to him, he starts to realise there are plenty of terms and conditions to living that he may not have been aware of in his previous incarnation…

I really enjoyed Frank and his gradual reawakening to life’s possibilities, and how the underdog can actually come out on top!

Lorrie Moore

A collection of eight short stories, this is the first from this celebrated writer in 15 years. Each story explores time’s passing and its effects on relationships. Very few of the characters are happy or even content; mostly they are in the ruins of personal relationships – marriages dissolving, friends dying, the aftermath of divorce and all the attendant griefs of failure.

Observant, occasionally poignant, tender and often just on the edge of something hopeful, these are fine examples of how the short story can often convey more than whole novels.


 This is the life by Alex Shearer


Alex Shearer

I think so far this year, that this is my favourite novel. It is a tender and sometimes poignant novel of two brothers and their loving but sometimes difficult past. The younger one has left his family and work in England to fly to Brisbane to be by his brother's side. Louis has brain cancer, it turns out, but he's not going down without a fight.

He has never quite found his place in the world, possessing both intelligence and principles in equal measure; nor has he ever really settled down as restlessness and his own eccentricities play against other people understanding him fully. Despite this, Louis' friends are true ones, and his younger brother adores and tolerates him. As the disease takes hold, and takes away, brotherly love supports, consoles, and deepens the understanding, that this is the life.

With a cast of beautifully drawn characters, and a feeling that this is not a novel but almost a memoir, the veracity of the descriptions and wonderful flashes of humour make this touching book quite special indeed.


COMING IN MAY




Anthony Doerr

Marie-Laure loses her sight at the age of six. Her father, the locksmith for the National Museum of Natural History in Paris, helps her navigate her life by constructing intricate models of her surroundings. Werner is an orphan living in Zollverein who has an uncanny mechanical aptitude but in Nazi Germany is destined for the coal mines that claimed his father’s life.

As they grow, both Marie-Laure and Werner face challenges they can overcome, but the gathering forces of war are going to rip them from their accustomed lives. When Marie-Laure and her father flee Paris for St Malo, they are carrying what may be a precious and myth-shrouded jewel – or a decoy to fool the Nazi treasure plunderers. Werner also finds himself serving in St Malo, his talent for wireless engineering much in demand. He has succumbed to the ideology of his times, but uneasiness is always under the surface of his thoughts. When the Americans bomb St Malo there may be a chance for redemption…

An intricate novel but easily read as the alternating chapters follow first one then the other character. Beautifully plotted and very finely written, this was a moving, haunting story of the effects war has on innocence.

Marianne Kavanagh

Tess believes in soul mates. She’s pretty sure that the thoughtful, attractive and faithful Dominic is hers. George doesn’t believe in soul mates, but he does believe in music, love and doing the right thing. They’ve never met, but they have mutual friends, most of whom think Tess and George would be good together. It takes a few years, and plenty of mistakes before they do finally meet, but by then both are happily enmeshed with other partners. Or are they?

A charmingly entertaining and ebullient novel that is perfect for a lazy weekend (and will no doubt one day make a perfect Saturday afternoon rom-com movie!).


Buy these books at Abbey's (131 York Street Sydney) ~ An Aladdin's cave for readers

Abbey's ~ An Aladdin's cave for readers

Conversations in Crime Alley: NEWTON & NUNN on APRIL 10




Step aside Dalziel and Pascoe. Take a walk Cagney and Lacey. Newton and Nunn will be taking to the mics.

AUTHOR EVENT: Join Sydney author P M Newton and Swaziland-author-who-calls-Australia-home Malla Nunn for a free-ranging (and FREE) conversation about crime novels, crime authors and crime writing.

P M Newton spent over a decade as a detective in the NSW police force, including time in Sydney's southwest and the Drug Enforcement Agency. Her debut novel The Old School signalled her as being an exciting new home-grown crime writing talent and the follow-up Beams Falling has just arrived into store and went straight into our bestsellers.

Malla Nunn was born in Swaziland, South Africa, and currently lives in Sydney. She is also a filmmaker with three award-winning films to her credit. Her novels include A Beautiful Place to DieLet the Dead Lie, and Silent Valley.

We would very much like you to join us on the night ~ please RSVP to events@abbeys.com.au

THURSDAY 10 APRIL

6PM

131 YORK STREET, SYDNEY




Buy these books at Abbey's (131 York Street Sydney) ~ An Aladdin's cave for readers

Abbey's ~ An Aladdin's cave for readers