The Blurb (from Goodreads):
When Jessica’s partner disappears into the dark Tasmanian forest, there is of course the mystery of what happened to him. The deserted car; the enigmatic final image on his phone.
There is the strange circle of local women, widows of disappeared men, with their edgy fellowship and unhinged theories.
And the forest itself: looming hugely over this tiny settlement on the remote tip of the island.
But for Jessica there is also the tight community in which she is still a stranger and Matthew was not. What secrets do they know about her own life that she doesn't? And why do they believe things that should not—cannot—be true. For her own sanity, Jessica needs to know two things. Who was Matthew? And who—or what—has he become?
My Thoughts:
An eerie, atmospheric, and unsettling book set in modern-day Tasmania, written with a deft touch and beautiful, supple prose. Krissy Kneen takes a story of a young woman locked into a relationship with a charming but controlling man, and twists in touches of the gothic to create something really fresh and unusual.
Jessica Weir is a 30-year-old PhD candidate, studying glow-worms in subterranean caves in Tasmania. She lives with her boyfriend Matthew, who grew up in the small country town where they live and knows everyone. Jessica, however, knows nobody but him. And that should be enough, she keeps telling herself. One day Matthew doesn’t come home from work. His car is abandoned on the edge of the wilderness. His phone shows a video of an encounter with someone … something … on the road. But it’s too dark to be sure. Jessica tries to find out what happened to him, but grief and guilt and loneliness can be unhinging. Because, surely, what Jessica begins to believe has happened could not possibly be true …
You might also like to read my review of The Dry by Jane Harper:
https://kateforsyth.com.au/what-katie-read/vintage-book-review
The Blurb (from Goodreads):
Witches occupy a clear place in contemporary imagination. We can see them, emerging shadowy, from the corners of the past: mad, glamorous, difficult, strange. They haunt the footnotes of history - from medieval witches burning at the stake to the lurid glamour of the 1970s witchcraft revival.
But they are moving out of history, too. Witches are back. They’re feminist, independent, invested in self-care and care for the world.
They are here, because they must be needed…‘In A Spell in the Wild, Alice Tarbuck explores what it means to be a witch today. Where ‘witch’ was once a dangerous - and often deadly - accusation, it is now a proud self-definition. And as the world becomes ever more complicated and we face ecological, political, social and global health crises, witchcraft is experiencing a resurgence.
Magic is back. Alice describes what she practises as ‘intersectional, accessible’ witchcraft - it’s about the magic you can find in an overgrown snicket or a sixth floor stairwell; whatever your gender; whether you’re able to climb a mountain or can’t leave the house. Month by month, Alice walks us through everyday magic for extraordinary times.
My Thoughts:
I bought this book on impulse, because it had such a pretty cover and I loved the title. It was a wonderful surprise. Alice Tarbuck is a poet, an academic, and a witch. The book is divided into twelve parts, one for each month of the year, and delves into the dark history of witchcraft and the bright practise of spellwork. It’s a beguiling mixture of a warm, intimate, expressive personal voice, and a clear-sighted rigorous examination of the many myths and misunderstandings surrounding witchcraft.
I am very familiar with most of the history she examines, including the Scottish witch trials and King James’s Daeomonologie, but some was new to me and opened up ideas for further reading. And I loved the simplicity and openness in which she spoke about her own quest to find the sacred in the ordinary, every-day world: Magic isn't somewhere else. It isn't a series of distant rituals, ancient texts and expensive courses. Magic is turning to the world, and seeing it, and knowing we are indistinguishable from it, in all our embodied, strange, soft and edgeless form. We are in the world and it is in us.
Get your copy of A Spell In The Wild hereYou might also like to read my review of Daughters of Witching Hill by Mary Sharratt:
VINTAGE POST: Daughters of the Witching Hill by Mary Sharratt
The last time I was here was to talk to you about ‘The Gypsy Crown’ and the Chain of Charms series, which was the beginning of an amazing few years for me - and for that I’d like to thank all of you at Pan Macmillan - from my wonderful publisher Claire, to my extraordinary editors Julia and Catherine (who went so far as to visit Scotland in the middle of a bitterly cold winter to test my research), to the gorgeous Sue who has worked so hard to spread the word, to every single one of you that went out on the road persuading booksellers to take my book and not somebody’s else. Thank you, all!
‘The Gypsy Crown’ was a real breakthrough book for me - the last 5 books in the series won the Aurealis Award for Best Children’s Books, plus Book 5 was a CBCA Notable Book. The US edition was also nominated for a CYBIL Award in the US and a Surrey Book Of The Year award in Canada.
It also saw a massive growth in the number of countries my books are published in with that number now being 12 (Australia, NZ, the US, Canada, the UK, Germany, Italy, Spain, Russia, Japan, Indonesia, and Poland.)
I have just this month been on an international blog tour for my last novel ‘The Puzzle Ring’, with countries involved including Slovenia and Argentina, while last year I was on a book tour in the US & UK. This June I’m off to Greece to teach a week’s long writer’s retreat at Skyros. Past teachers have included Margaret Drabble, Booker-prize winner Hilary Mantel, and now Kate Forsyth. It’s a dream come true – being paid to go to Greece!
I have always wanted to be a writer. I think I was born knowing that’s what I was meant to be. Certainly, I was born into a family of storytellers. My great-great-great-great-great-grandmother wrote the first children’s book published in Australia – (A Mother’s Offering - $50,000). My great-great-great-great-aunt was our first Australian-born novelist (born 1834 – died aged 38, daughter just 18 days old) (Gertrude).
I think it’s utterly amazing that all my dreams have come true. I get to make my living daydreaming, making up stories and writing them down, and knowing that people all over the world can read them – even if they don’t speak my language! (foreign editions)
I’d like to share with you an e-mail I received last Friday:
Hi Kate, My name is Kristen, I'm seventeen and I read The Starthorn Tree YEARS ago. My friends and I used to act our favourite scenes and makeup what was going to happen next to Pedrin, Durrick, Lisandre, Briony, Mags and Sedgely (I always loved Sedgely!). To this day it is still one of my favourite books and I could read it again and again and again! The Starthorn Tree was one of the most inspirational books I've ever read and started my love for fantasy writing. I've grown to love writing other styles as well, but The Starthorn Tree will always hold as the ultimate fantasy for me 🙂 I was wondering if there would be any chance of a second book (or more!) that I should be watching out for? I know it has been a long time since it was first published, but I can't help but continue to hope! Thank you for sharing your amazing stories with our minds, and sparking my imagination Kristen Blair xoxo
Well, I was very happy to be able to write back to her & let her know that the long-awaited sequel to The Starthorn Tree has finally arrived!
The Wildkin’s Curse is a tale of true love & high adventure, set in a world of magic & monsters, valiant heroes and wicked villains. It tells the story of two boys and a girl who undertake the impossible task of rescuing a wildkin princess from a crystal tower.
The princess Rozalina has the power to enchant with words – she can conjure up a plague of rats or wish the dead out of their graves, she can woo a cruel king with her stories and, when she casts a curse, it has such power it will change her world forever.
The Wildkin’s Curse is a book about the power of stories to set us free.
Those of you that have read my other books may wonder why it is I so love to read books that are filled with wild adventure and thrilling escapes, set in faraway lands and long-ago times, and that so often feature towers and prisons and besieged castles.
I wonder if it is because I spent a great deal of my childhood in hospital, with nothing to do but read books, write stories, and stare out the window and dream of escape. I could tell you why I spent most of my childhood in hospital, but that’s a whole other story ...
I was enchanted with the Grimm Brothers’ fairy-tales from the moment I read them as a little girl, sick and lonely in hospital. I was only seven, but I still remember the transformative experience of reading the tales by myself for the first time.
I had been given a copy of the edition translated by Lucy Crane in 1882, and illustrated by the exquisite line drawings of her brother Walter. The tales were bound in red leather with gilt lettering, like something rare and precious. That book began for me a lifelong fascination with fairy-tales.
Like many people, I thought the Grimm brothers had lived long, long ago, and had travelled around Germany collecting stories from old women hunched over their spinning wheels in cottages hidden deep in the forest.
My view of their lives and work was romantically coloured by the film The Wonderful World of the Brothers Grimm. Wilhelm Grimm (played by the brooding Lithuanian-born actor Laurence Harvey) neglects his work as a researcher for a duke, collecting folk-tales instead and scribbling them down each night in his garret. Poor and desperate, he ends up feverishly ill with pneumonia but all the fairy-tale characters from his tales appear to him in a dream, begging him not to die. They say: "Our lives depend on you. If you die, we will never be born! Who will give us our names?"
So Wilhelm names them. Tom Thumb, Cinderella, Snow White, Hansel and Gretel, Little Red Riding Hood, Rumpelstiltskin ...
That was, I am sure, the moment in which I learned that stories cannot exist without a storyteller.
Wilhelm recovers and takes up his quill again. Papers fly everywhere, and then – with a crescendo of dramatic music – a great thick leather-bound book appears, filled with tales of adventure and wonder. I was riveted to the screen. So that’s how it happens, I thought to myself. That’s how books are made.
In the final scene of the movie, Jacob and Wilhelm are invited to join the Royal Academy in Berlin, but no mention is made of Wilhelm’s seminal work in collecting and rewriting the old tales. Jacob plans to make a speech condemning the Academy for their neglect of him. When Wilhelm and his wife Dorothea arrive at the station in Berlin, however, they are met by a crowd of children all chanting ‘We want a story! We want a story!’
Wilhelm draws the children close and says, ‘Once upon a time there were two brothers …’
I remember watching that scene, sitting in the backseat of my father’s car at a drive-in movie theatre, with a big lump in my throat as if I had tried to swallow a whole handful of popcorn. I had to wipe my eyes on the sleeve of my t-shirt. I might have been ten or eleven, a skinny kid with long brown plaits and scabby knees and fingers always marked with blue ink from all the scribbling I did myself.
What I felt was a kind of longing. I wanted that moment for myself.
This was not a flash of epiphany in which I realised I had to be a writer. I already knew that. I’d written at least two novels already by then. Maybe three.
The Wonderful World of the Brothers Grimm was, however, the moment in which I became interested in the tales behind the tales … in the history and the meaning and the purpose of stories.
Soon afterwards, I read ‘The Glass Slipper’ by Eleanor Farjeon and ‘The Stone Castle’ by Nicholas Stuart Gray, novels which quickened my lifelong love of fairy-tale retellings. As I grew up, I discovered C.S. Lewis’s retelling of ‘Cupid and Psyche’, Till We Have Faces, and Robin McKinley’s Beauty. At university, I studied ‘Children’s Literature’ and ‘Culture, Myth and Symbolism’, and read Jung and Bettelheim and Warner and Zipes for the first time.
By now I was getting published … a poem here and a story there … and I was writing a novel which drew on ‘The Little Mermaid’. A girl who cannot speak, whose every step in the world hurts her. I dressed in flowing velvet dresses with boots, and tried to grow my hair long enough to sit on it.
My interest in fairy tales continued. I bought books with titles like ‘Redemption Motifs in Fairy Tales’ and ‘The Witch Must Die: The Hidden Meaning of Fairy Tales’. I kept on reading, I kept on writing, I kept on being published.
Then, one day, I decided to write a story which had been haunting my imagination for as long as I could remember – a retelling of ‘Rapunzel’. To help me do the story justice, I wrote my novel Bitter Greens as part of a Doctorate of Creative Arts and so got to spend three or four years steeping myself in fairy-tale studies.
When I begin a new novel the first thing I do is begin compiling my library. I hunt out all the old rare and cobwebby books on my subject that I can – and the fresh bright ones too. Then I begin to obsessively read.
One of the books I bought for my research was called Clever Maids: The Secret History of the Grimm Fairy Tales by the US writer and academic, Dr Valerie Paradiž. It examines the oral and literary sources of the famous tales, giving names and a history to the storytellers who had passed on their lore to Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm.
Most of them were women.
For example, ‘Aschenputtel’ was told by a poor old woman in a workhouse in the small medieval town of Marburg.
‘Little Red Cap’ was told by Jeannette and Marie Hassenpflug, young middle-class women of French descent who met often in a storytelling circle in Hesse, the town in which the Grimm brothers lived. They were also the sources of ‘The Robber Bridegroom’ and ‘Briar. Their brother Louis married the Grimm brothers’ younger sister, Lotte.
‘The Worn-Out Dancing Shoes’ was told to Wilhelm by Jenny von Droste-Hülstoff, the niece of Werner von Haxthausen, who studied law with the Grimms at Marburg University. His sisters (Jenny’s aunts) told him ‘The Bremen Town Musicians’.
‘The Goose Girl’ was told by Dorothea Viehmann, widow to an innkeeper, who came to the Grimms’ house selling vegetables. She also told Wilhelm ‘Hans My Hedgehog’ and ‘The Lazy Spinner’, among numerous other tales, and was immortalised by Wilhelm’s description of her as the perfect storyteller in the introduction to the second volume on tales, published in 1814. (In the 1980s, this extolling of Dorothea Viehmann by the Grimms – when all the other tellers were kept anonymous – was interpreted as a kind of literary fraud by the American academic John M. Ellis. He theorises in his book One Fairy Tale Too Many that the Grimms deliberately set out to create the myth that their tales were told to them by poor old German peasants and so deliberately concealed the identities of other, more bourgeois tellers. His theory has caused quite a lot of controversy but has not ultimately dimmed the Grimm brothers’ lustre.)
The biggest contribution to the brothers’ collection of tales was the girl who had grown up next door to them. Her name was Henriette Dorothea Wild but she was called Dortchen by her friends and family, and she was just nineteen when she began to share her stories. She was the source of ‘Rumpelstiltskin’, ‘Six Swans’, ‘The Frog King’, ‘The Elves and the Shoemaker’, ‘Sweetheart Roland’, ‘Mother Holle’, ‘The Three Little Men in the Wood’, ‘The Singing Bone’, ‘All-Kinds-of-Fur’, and ‘The Singing, Springing Lark’, and she was also the most probable source of ‘Hansel and Gretel’. Dortchen certainly provided the famous rhymes, usually translated into English as ‘Little mouse, little mouse, who is nibbling at my house?’ with the children replying, ‘it’s the wind so wild, the heavenly child.’
Dortchen Wild told Wilhelm Grimm almost one quarter of the Grimm brothers’ first collection of fairy tales. She also, in the end, married him.
So, when Wilhelm stepped off the train in Berlin to a crowd of adoring children clamouring for a story in The Wonderful World of the Brothers Grimm, it should have been his wife Dorothea who drew the children close and told them a story. Yet in the movie all she does is listen and smile.
Perhaps it was the injustice of this that made me want to tell her story so passionately. Perhaps it was because I too was a storyteller struggling to make my voice heard. Perhaps it was because the true love story of Wilhelm Grimm and Dortchen Wild was far more full of drama and heartbreak and triumph than any script cooked up by MGM.
Jane Yolen is one of my favourite children’s authors. She moves easily between wonderful picture books like Owl Moon and How Do Dinosaurs say Tonight? to some of the most beautiful and important fiction for older readers, The Devil’s Arithmetic and Briar Rose, both of which deal with the Holocaust.
She has also written Queen’s Own Fool, a superb historical novel told from the point of view of Mary, Queen of Scots’ favourite jester. As you all know, I’ve spent the last year totally possessed by this tragic Scottish queen, which builds on a lifetime’s love and obsession with Scotland. Jane Yolen has what I consider a practically perfect life – she spends 4-6 months of every year in Scotland and Europe, and the other months in Hatfield, Massachusetts, a beautiful and historic town on the Connecticut River.
Called the Hans Christian Andersen of America, she is also a poet, a teacher, and a reviewer and critic of children's literature. Jane Yolen's books and stories have won the Caldecott Medal, two Nebula Awards, two Christopher Medals, the World Fantasy Award, three Mythopoeic Fantasy Awards, the Golden Kite Award, and the Jewish Book Award, among many others.
She is also the author of one of the best books ever written about the importance of fantasy in children’s literature. Called Touch Magic – Fantasy, Faerie & Folklore in the Literature of Childhood, it was first published in 1981, and recently reissued and expanded. Here is one of my favourite quotes from it:
“To do without tales and stories and books is to lose humanity’s past, is to have no star map for the future.’
So I’m very proud and pleased to have Jane as the first of my favourite writers to be featured in my newsletter. Here are the answers to my questions:
Are you a daydreamer too?
Definitely. Though before I became a writer of fiction, I daydreamed situations in my life differently. I was the prima ballerina of Balanchine's company, the owner of a horse ranch, queen of the prom. Now I daydream larger scenarios in which I do not figure, but my characters do.
Have you always wanted to be a writer?
Yes, because my parents were both writers. Maybe "want' is the wrong word, though. I just assumed a ll adults were writers, along with their day jobs.
Where do you write?
Anywhere my laptop is. Sometimes in my official writing room, sometimes in my tv room. (A bad back precludes sitting for long periods at a formal desk.) Sometimes in the summer in the garden.
What is your favourite part of writing?
All of it. I love the initial spurt where something comes of nothing. The moment after I had no ideas at all, and suddenly my fingers are typing something new. Finding a better way of saying a sentence. Finding out what a character secretly wants. When an ending surprises me. And I love revisions because there are more surprises. The only thing I don't love is the sadness of finishing. The surprises are over, I am leaving my most intimate friends. Some I may never see or talk to again.
What do you do when you get blocked?
Work on something else.That leaves the hindbrain, the lizard brain, alone to figure out the blockage. It always works, though it may take years. I am of the firm conviction that things DO work out.
Kate: How do you keep your well of inspiration full?
By reading, listening, being curious about the world.
Kate: Do you have any rituals that help you to write?
A cup of tea and fingers on the keyboard, butt in chair.
Kate: Who are ten of your favourite writers?
Isak Dinesen, James Thurber, William Butler Yeats, Emily Dickinson, Alice Hoffman, Ursula LeGuin, Ruth Rendell, Robert Louis Stevenson, William Shakespeare, Bernard Cornwell.
Kate: What do you consider to be good writing?
Munchy prose, lyrical lines, strong storytelling.
Kate: What is your advice for someone dreaming of being a writer too?
B.I.C - Butt in chair. Read something every day. Write something every day--no vacations. Breathe in the world.
Jane Yolen’s website: http://www.janeyolen.com/
I have written books set in Kent during the time of Charles II and Oliver Cromwell (The Gypsy Crown); set in Scotland during the tumultuous reign of Mary, Queen of Scots (The Puzzle Ring); in Renaissance Venice and Versailles in the time of the Sun King (Bitter Greens); in Germany during the Napoleonic wars (The Wild Girl); and in Berlin in the time of the Third Reich (The Beast’s Garden).
With each novel, I have had to totally immerse myself in the place and the time, being careful to remember when spinning wheels were invented; when windows began to have glass in them instead of a flap of ox-skin; whether one drank out of pewter mugs or crystal glass; who wore underwear and who did not; and what use they had for the contents of their chamber-pots.
Bitter Greens was particularly tricky, as it moves between two timeframes and two distinctly different worlds (Venice in the time of plagues and witch-hunts, Versailles in the time of high-heeled ballet and wigs).
All my books were research-intensive. In some cases, I spent years doing the reading I needed. I think research is one aspect of writing a novel that should never be skimped. Gustave Flaubert once wrote that ‘God is in the details’. What he meant is that it is in the small details that a world is brought to vivid life … and getting these small details wrong can break the spell of enchantment a story casts over its readers.
A writer must know intimately the world in which our characters move. We must understand how they think, how they feel, what they wear and eat and drink, what gods they cry out to in their despair and how they cast wishes. We have to make the invented world of our story feel so real that our readers believe in its possibility. The only way to do that is to be deeply steeped in the time and place in which our story is set.
Yet writers can sometimes struggle with the burden of research. They don’t know what they need to know, they don’t know how to find it, and they don’t know how much they should do. I get asked the same questions again and again, and over time I have developed my Top Tips For Effective Research:
Researching can be one of the most difficult, time-consuming and exhausting aspects of being a historical novelist, or it can be one of the most enjoyable. For me, it is always the latter. I love researching. It’s reading with a purpose. It’s a journey of discovery in which you find all sorts of hilarious and heart-rending things that will help make your novel an extraordinary reading experience.
The Blurb (from Goodreads):
A mesmerising literary novel about a lost man in search of connection - a meditation on love, art and commitment, set against the backdrop of one of the greatest art events in modern history, Marina Abramovic's The Artist is Present.
'Art will wake you up. Art will break your heart. There will be glorious days. If you want eternity you must be fearless.' From The Museum of Modern Love
She watched as the final hours of The Artist is Present passed by, sitter after sitter in a gaze with the woman across the table. Jane felt she had witnessed a thing of inexplicable beauty among humans who had been drawn to this art and had found the reflection of a great mystery. What are we? How should we live?
If this was a dream, then he wanted to know when it would end. Maybe it would end if he went to see Lydia. But it was the one thing he was not allowed to do.
Arky Levin is a film composer in New York separated from his wife, who has asked him to keep one devastating promise. One day he finds his way to The Atrium at MOMA and sees Marina Abramovic in The Artist is Present. The performance continues for seventy-five days and, as it unfolds, so does Arky. As he watches and meets other people drawn to the exhibit, he slowly starts to understand what might be missing in his life and what he must do.
This dazzlingly original novel asks beguiling questions about the nature of art, life and love and finds a way to answer them.
My Thoughts:
I love art in all its forms, and had heard so many wonderful reviews of The Museum of Modern Love by Heather Rose (which won the 2017 Stella Prize) that I had been wanting to read it for a long time.
However, I did not buy the book until after I interviewed Heather Rose for Word of Mouth TV earlier this year and was fascinated by the story of the book’s inspiration and long genesis.
The story is centred on the true-life art performance ‘The Artist is Present’, in which Serbian-born artist Marina Abramovic sits silently on a chair at the Museum of Modern Art (MOMA) in New York for seventy-five days, without speaking or moving or showing any outward sign that she is alive. People visiting the museum have the chance to sit with her and look into her eyes, but are not permitted to speak or act in any way.
This act of silent connection proves extraordinarily moving and inspiring for many thousands of people, who queue up day after day to watch and participate. In all, 1,500 people would sit with Marina Abramovic and more than 850,000 people watched, some returning day after day after day (including Heather Rose who sat with the artist four times).
In the world of Heather Rose’s extraordinary, luminous novel, we met several imaginary people who are also drawn to watch. Among them are Arky Levin, a film composer separated from his wife, and Jane Miller, a widow who had once been a teacher. Both are struggling with loss and grief; both are drawn to Marina Abramovic’s installation for reasons they do not fully understand. They meet when Jane, annoyed by a stranger’s patronising remarks about modern art, turns to Arky and says, ‘I think art saves people all the time.’
I think art saves people too. I think it has saved me more than once. And so this is a book that resonated with me on so many levels.
Arky and Jane do not fall in love. Their lives touch only briefly, yet both are changed by their encounter, with each other and with ‘The Artist is Present’ installation. So too are the lives of others in the crowd, some of whome we meet only briefly. Without moving, without speaking, Marina Abramovic is an agent of revelation and transformation.
‘It is her metier to dance on the edge of madness, to vault over pain into the solace of disintegration,’ Heather Rose writes of her.
Other voices who speak in this beautiful and beguiling novel are the ghost of Marina Abramovic’s mother, a fierce and unrelenting woman who had been a Serbian war hero, and an unnamed narrator who acts as a muse to Arky and other struggling artists.
‘Pain is the stone that art sharpens itself on time after time,’ the muse says at one point.
These elements of magical realism are interwoven so delicately and surely that they do not disrupt the narrative flow at all, but add intensity and pathos as well as a sense of wonder and amazement at the extraordinary way art and creativity can shape and succour the human psyche.
After I finished The Museum of Modern Art, I too was fascinated by Marina Abramovic and read or watched numerous articles and documentaries about her. I love a book that drives me to learn more.
It took Heather rose more than eleven years to craft this exquisitely written novel, a testament to the depth of her obsession and the dedication to her craft. It is definitely one of the best books I’ve read this year. Quite possibly, one of the best book I’ve read ever.
You might also read my review of The Museum of Words by Georgia Blain:
BOOK REVIEW: The Museum of Words by Georgia Blain
The Blurb:
A cache of unsent love letters from the 1950s is found in a suitcase on a remote island in this mysterious love story by top ten bestselling author, Kayte Nunn
1951. Esther Durrant, a young mother, is committed to an isolated mental asylum by her husband. Run by a pioneering psychiatrist, the hospital is at first Esther's prison but soon becomes her refuge.
2018. Free-spirited marine scientist Rachel Parker embarks on a research posting in the Isles of Scilly, off the Cornish coast. When a violent storm forces her to take shelter on a far-flung island, she discovers a collection of hidden love letters. Captivated by their passion and tenderness, Rachel determines to track down the intended recipient.
Meanwhile, in London, Eve is helping her grandmother, a renowned mountaineer, write her memoirs. When she is contacted by Rachel, it sets in motion a chain of events that threatens to reveal secrets kept buried for more than sixty years.
The Forgotten Letters of Esther Durrant is a deeply atmospheric, resonant novel that charts the heart's wild places, choices and consequences. If you love Elizabeth Gilbert and Kate Morton you will devour this book.
My Thoughts:
I love a dual timeline novel, and Kayte Nunn’s previous book The Botanist’s Daughter was great. So I was really looking forward to her new book which has the added bonus of a truly gorgeous cover.
The story begins in 1951. Esther Durrant is going on holiday with her husband, but she is too exhausted and dazed with grief to pay much attention to their destination. It’s cold and wintry, and the boat is sailing across rough waters, and she wants to be home with their little boy Teddy. She cannot understand why her husband is so insistent upon taking her to a remote island, so far from home.
Until she arrives, and realises she is being committed to a mental asylum.
What a beginning!
The story moves swiftly and deftly from here, moving between Esther’s story in the ‘50s to the voice of a free-spirited young woman who finds Esther’s forgotten letters while stuck on the same island in modern times.
The characters are all vivid and interesting, and there’s a dash of romance and a splash of intrigue. A really enjoyable read.
You might also like to read my review of Love or Nearest Offer by Adele Geras:
https://kateforsyth.com.au/what-katie-read/book-review-love-or-nearest-offer-by-adele-geras
The Blurb:
At twenty-two, Cheryl Strayed thought she had lost everything. In the wake of her mother’s death, her family scattered and her own marriage was soon destroyed. Four years later, with nothing more to lose, she made the most impulsive decision of her life. With no experience or training, driven only by blind will, she would hike more than a thousand miles of the Pacific Crest Trail from the Mojave Desert through California and Oregon to Washington State — and she would do it alone.
Told with suspense and style, sparkling with warmth and humor, Wild powerfully captures the terrors and pleasures of one young woman forging ahead against all odds on a journey that maddened, strengthened, and ultimately healed her.
My Thoughts:
This memoir made Cheryl Strayed famous, and was turned into a movie starring Reese Witherspoon. I read her collection of advice columns Tiny Beautiful Things last year and loved it, and so I thought I’d give Wild a go. It is a very frank and moving memoir of Cheryl’s epic hike along the thousand miles of the Pacific Crest Trail, which travels from the scorching heat of the Mojave Desert through to the icy forests of Washington State. As Cheryl walks, she reflects on her overwhelming grief for her mother, who died of cancer much too young, and her regret for the way she sought oblivion in sex and drugs, causing her marriage to fail and her relationship with her siblings to deteriorate. Her honesty is astonishing and liberating, but I hope it did not cause any more damage to those in her family. I have always wanted to do a long hike somewhere beautiful, and this book is very inspiring about the power of such a challenging adventure. She writes:
I knew that if I allowed fear to overtake me, my journey was doomed. Fear, to a great extent, is born of a story we tell ourselves, and so I chose to tell myself a different story from the one women are told. I decided I was safe. I was strong. I was brave. Nothing could vanquish me.
You might also like to read my review of The Erratics by Vicki Laveau- Harvie:
https://kateforsyth.com.au/what-katie-read/book-review-the-erratics-by-vicki-laveau-harvie
