A tale for the time being

'Hi! My name is Nao, and I am a time being. Do you know what a time being is? Well, if you give me a moment, I will tell you.'

 

Ruth is a novelist living on a remote island off Canada’s Pacific northwest. She discovers a lunchbox washed ashore. It could be debris from the 2011 Japanese tsunami. Inside the Hello Kitty lunchbox is a diary written by Nao, a 16 year old Japanese schoolgirl. Nao has decided there’s only one escape from her aching loneliness and her classmates’ bullying. But before she ends it all she wants to document the life of her great-grandmother. In a small cafe in Tokyo, Nao writes about the joy and heartbreak of family life and her great-grandmother, a 104-year-old Zen anarchist nun.  

CITATION: Ozeki, Ruth. A tale for the time being. New York Viking, 2013.  422 pages. 

Also available in large print , audiobook, ebook & kindle. 

Shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize 2013. 

Book promotional video.

Watch the author Ruth Ozeki video interview.

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.

 

 

The light between oceans

Set in 1918 on a remote island lighthouse off Southwest Australia. A dramatic wild setting where Tom Sherbourne has retreated to live a solitary life in the hope of erasing his emotional scars after distinguished service in World War I. While on leave he meets Isabel, they marry and she joins him at the lighthouse.  In peaceful isolation their romance blooms - but after 4 years and several heartbreaking miscarriages, their marriage is tested to the limit. Two weeks after the tragic loss of a premature baby, a dinghy drifts ashore carrying a dead man and a newborn baby in great distress. Against Tom’s protests, Isabel wants to keep the baby that she sees as a gift from God. Only years later will they understand that the choice they make will haunt them forever.

CITATION: Stedman, M.L., The light between oceans. North Sydney, NSW: Vintage Books, 2012.

The New York Times bestseller soon to be a major motion picture from Spielberg’s Dreamworks that is “irresistible…seductive…with a high concept plot that keeps you riveted from the first page.”  –O, The Oprah Magazine.

Also available in large print, audiobook & kindle ebook.
More about this book including video interview with the author and 'browse inside' feature from the Publishers website - Simon and Schuster.

Hollywood comes to Stanley, (Tasmania) starring Michael Fassbender, Rachel Weisz.

Stanley, Tasmania.     photo credit - ABC News

When Captain flint was still a good man

Young Cal lives with his parents on Loyalty Island. Each winter, Cal's father - a ship’s captain - sails to Alaska for 6 months to catch king crab. Cal feels the emotional gulf and tension caused by his father’s absence but knows their livelihood depends on it. He fills his head with stories of pirates on Treasure Island (where R L Stevenson created the original Captain Flint). When John Gaunt, the owner of the fleet dies suddenly, Cal wonders about the relationship his mother has had with Gaunt. His untimely death puts the fleet on the brink of collapse. Cal finds evidence that his father has resorted to desperate measures to save their way of life. Cal’s loyalty faces the ultimate test.

CITATION: Dybek, Nick. When Captain Flint was still a good man. New York : Riverhead Books, 2012.


...peopled with multidimensional characters and featuring well-drawn settings. Dybek writes well about family, about relationships and loyalty, about responsibility and community, and about all that passes from father to son. –Kirkus reviews

Read the transcript of an interview by Granta with author Nick Dybek.

Available on kindle and audiobook. 

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).