Generation loss

Art needs light – look at the lack of it. –Patti Smith, book frontpiece.

Generation loss: the loss of quality between subsequent copies of data, such as sound recordings, video, or photographs.

Music is a big part of this novel about Cass Neary – a photographer whose hard living lifestyle has caught up with her. This self-destructive anti-heroine was once famous for her pictures of the 1970s New York punk scene. Now she has been forgotten and jobs are hard to come by. As a mercy mission, an old friend assigns her to interview iconic 60s photographer, Aphrodite Kamestos who lives as a recluse on her own private island off the coast of Maine. Aphrodite is not interested in being interviewed by Cass.

On the island Cass learns ‘that a commune Aphrodite helped found has taken her bleak aesthetic to the next level in an effort to penetrate mysteries of life and death.’ – Publishers Weekly.

“Cass confronts a horrifying embodiment of the extremes to which her own artistic inclinations could lead…Hand explores the narrow boundary between artistic genius and madness in this gritty, profoundly unsettling literary thriller.” – Publishers Weekly (starred review)

Citation: Hand, Elizabeth. Generation Loss. Northampton, MA: Small Beer Press: Distributed to the trade by Consortium, 2007. 320 pages.

Read about the author + reviews and her other books at the Elizabeth Hand website. Watch her video interview. 

All the birds, Singing

A Miles Franklin award winner (2014), this is a story of stubborn hopes and unexpected beauty.  Jake Whyte is a hard working, hard headed young woman living alone and tending sheep on a remote British island. Her wayward dog is her only companion.  This wild, windswept island is isolated, although past emotional scars mean that's the way she wants it.

Suspense builds as her sheep go missing at night. Could it be foxes in the woods, a strange boy, or rumours of a mysterious beast? And there are demons of Jake's Australian past, intruding into the present...

CITATION: Wyld, Evie. All the birds singing. North Sydney, NSW:  Random House Australia, 2013.

 

Swift and assured and emotionally wrenching. You won’t only root for Jake, you’ll see the world, hard facts and all, more clearly through her telling.       
                                                     - The New York Times.


 

Readers feedback, a free chapter and notes about the author plus a video interview with Evie Wyld at the official publisher's  website.

Listen to the ABC radio interview with Evie Wyld.   
This title is also available in Large print, CD audiobook & kindle ebook.

 

 

Cloud Atlas

 

An ambitious novel presenting six different stories set in different time periods. Each story is read by the main character in the next chapter. After the sixth story, the other five stories are returned to and closed. The first begins in Chatham Islands (a remote Pacific archipelago off the coast of New Zealand) with the diary of a 19th-century notary. The second story shifts to 1931 with the letters of a penniless composer in 1931 Belgium. Then we meet a 1970s reporter who gets in the way of a nuclear energy company in California and a genetically engineered serf in a future "corpocracy" who slowly gains awareness of her plight. Finally we return to the Chatham islands, only centuries later in a post-civilisation world.

...brilliantly original fiction that reveals how disparate people connect, how their fates intertwine, and how their souls drift across time like clouds across the sky. – Goodreads   

Citation: Mitchell, David. The cloud atlas. London : Sceptre, 2004.

Available as a CD audiobook, kindle ebook + an enhanced edition with audio and video. Adapted for film starring Tom Hanks, Halle Berry.

Watch the video interview with David Mitchell :

Bodily Harm

Rennie is a young journalist whose comfortable world falls apart when she discovers that she has breast cancer. After her operation, she returns to find policemen in her apartment, investigating the presence of an intruder, an invader who has made himself at home in her kitchen and left a length of rope on her bed. Unnerved by these events, she decides on a holiday escape. She flies to St. Antoine, a fictitious Caribbean island.

...on the tiny island of St.  Antoine she is confronted by a world where her rules for survival no longer apply.  By turns comic, satiric, relentless, and terrifying, Margaret Atwood's Bodily Harm is ultimately an exploration of the lust for power, both sexual and political, and the need for compassion that goes beyond what we ordinarily mean by love. – Random House.

CITATION: Atwood, Margaret. Bodily Harm. New York : Bantam Books, 1996. 



Available in large print, audiobook, ebook. Look inside or listen to a sample at Amazon.
Listen to Margaret Atwood interviewed by Fay Weldon about Bodily Harm. (British Library mp3).