May’s book selection
In May, choose from a book that connects a pre-flu world and Year Twenty after global collapse, with 99% of people gone, and asks how you would protect that new world; another book that questions whether the wolves killed the farmer, and if not, who did; and a final book about art, romance, and people’s secrets in a remote farmhouse in Provence.
Find out about each one below and remember to email your choice.
Station Eleven
by Emily St. John Mandel
The New York Times Bestseller
Winner of the Arthur C. Clarke Award
Longlisted for the Baileys Women’s Prize for Fiction
National Book Awards Finalist
PEN/Faulkner Award Finalist
What was lost in the collapse: almost everything, almost everyone, but there is still such beauty.
One snowy night in Toronto famous actor Arthur Leander dies on stage whilst performing the role of a lifetime. That same evening a deadly virus touches down in North America. The world will never be the same again.
Twenty years later Kirsten, an actress in the Travelling Symphony, performs Shakespeare in the settlements that have grown up since the collapse. But then her newly hopeful world is threatened.
If civilization was lost, what would you preserve? And how far would you go to protect it?
Parts of the SMH Book Review:
Whereas most apocalypse novels push grimly forward into horror or dystopia, Station Eleven skips back and forth between the pre-flu world and Year Twenty after global collapse, when the worst is over and survivors have banded together into isolated settlements. Gradually, the book builds cumulative power as connections are made between the two time frames, and characters who do or don’t survive: including Jeevan, a paparazzo who planned to become a paramedic; Kirsten, a child actor who grows up to perform Shakespeare after the pandemic; and Miranda, whose creative energies were poured into a hand-drawn comic called Station Eleven which miraculously survives, becoming both a totem of the old world and a distorted mirror of the new.
The man who links them all, Arthur Leander, is a famous actor who dies on stage just before the Georgia Flu sweeps the world. Though he doesn’t experience the catastrophe, his story is at the heart of the book, and this is typical of Mandel’s roving, slantwise focus. For the last night on earth before the lights start to go out, she dwells on the production of King Lear which is Arthur’s last; in the post-pandemic world, she follows Kirsten and the rest of the Travelling Symphony, a peripatetic band of actors and musicians whose motto, taken from Star Trek, is “survival is insufficient”. They struggle and squabble – someone has scribbled “Hell is other people” inside one of their caravans, and someone else has crossed out “other people” and written “flutes” – but find safety and purpose as well as “moments of transcendent beauty” in their shared endeavour.
The glacial calm of her prose extends to the characters, so that while the book is visually stunning, dreamily atmospheric and impressively gripping, we never feel the urgency and panic of global disaster, let alone its moral weight.
Station Eleven is not so much about apocalypse as about memory and loss, nostalgia and yearning; the effort of art to deepen our fleeting impressions of the world and bolster our solitude. Mandel evokes the weary feeling of life slipping away, for Arthur as an individual and then writ large upon the entire world. In Year Twenty, Kirsten, who was eight when the flu hit, is interviewed about her memories, and says that the new reality is hardest to bear for those old enough to remember how the world was before. “The more you remember, the more you’ve lost,” she explains – a sentiment that could apply to any of us, here and now.
https://www.theguardian.com/books/2014/sep/25/station-eleven-review-emily-st-john-mandel
Amazon: Kindle Unlimited $0 or $8.99 to buy; Paperback $19.99
Booktopia: Paperback $21.75, Paperback $20.75
No copies at Kmart or Big W
Sutherland library: Ebook on Hoopla; eAudiobook on BorrowBox; Paperbacks 2 copies
Once There Were Wolves
by Charlotte McConaghy
INDIE FICTION BOOK OF THE YEAR AWARD WINNER 2022
Inti Flynn arrives in the Scottish Highlands with fourteen grey wolves, a traumatised sister and fierce tenacity.
As a biologist, she knows the animals are the best hope for rewilding the ruined landscape and she cares little for local opposition. As a sister, she hopes the remote project will offer her twin, Aggie, a chance to heal after the horrific events that drove them both out of Alaska.
A Community in Turmoil: But violence dogs their footsteps and one night Inti stumbles over the body of a farmer. Unable to accept that her wolves could be responsible, she makes a reckless decision to protect them.
A Tangled Web of Blame: But if the wolves didn’t make the kill, then who did? And can she trust the man she is beginning to love when he becomes the main suspect?
A Story That Will Stay with You: Propulsive and unforgettable, Once There Were Wolves is the spellbinding story of a woman desperate to save her family, the wild animals and the natural world she loves, at any cost.
Excerpt from the SMH Book Review
“Despite the darkness and pain at the heart of McConaghy’s novel, it is not a bleak book. Instead, it bears within it an argument about the possibility of change. Recognising the presence of other ways of being, of other minds and presences enlarges us, affording us a glimpse of the unknowable. Or as one of McConaghy’s characters reflects towards the end of this gripping and often very moving novel, “when you open your heart to rewilding a landscape, the truth is, you’re opening your heart to rewilding yourself”.”
Amazon: Kindle $14.99; Paperback $20.75
Booktopia: Paperback $20.75
Big W: Online only $21.94
Kmart: Doesn’t stock
Sutherland Library: Book – 4 copies, Audiobooks available
The Artist
by Lucy Steeds
PROVENCE, 1920
Ettie moves through the remote farmhouse, silently creating the conditions that make her uncle’s artistic genius possible.
Joseph, an aspiring journalist, has been invited to the house. He believes he’ll make his name by interviewing the reclusive painter, the great Edouard Tartuffe.
But everyone has their secrets. And, under the cover of darkness, Ettie has spent years cultivating hers.
Over this sweltering summer, everyone’s true colours will be revealed.
Because Ettie is ready to be seen.
Even if it means setting her world on fire.
Part of The Guardian review:
A love story wrapped in a mystery, Lucy Steeds’s vividly poetic debut novel begins cinematically and with a prophetic hint of myth: the arrival of a stranger on a dusty road, in his pocket a paper bearing the single-word summons, “Venez”. The year is 1920, in a Europe that is still under the pall of the war that should have ended all wars, and Steeds’s stranger is approaching a remote farmhouse in the Provençal village of Saint-Auguste where fabled painter Edouard Tartuffe – Tata, “the Master of Light” – lives with only his niece Ettie for company.
The newcomer is young Englishman Joseph Adelaide, a disappointed artist and aspiring journalist, in flight from the tragic consequences of a war that has robbed him of his beloved brother and estranged him from his family, after his overbearing father branded him a coward for his conscientious objection. Hoping to begin a new career as a writer on art, Joseph has petitioned Tartuffe for an interview. He asks more in hope than expectation, as Tartuffe is an enigma around whom myths swirl, and has shut himself away from the world for decades. But then the summons comes, and it seems that Joseph may begin his new life.
It soon becomes clear, however, that whoever scrawled that word of invitation, it was not Edouard Tartuffe. Joseph is far from welcome: the old painter, half-blind, monosyllabic and uncooperative, is at best indifferent and at worst violently hostile. Tata’s niece Ettie – motherless, illegitimate and weary under the burden of caring for a demanding and ruthlessly controlling old man – is shy, prickly, resentful and wary of all outsiders. But daily life revolves around the studio – even the oysters and peaches Ettie buys for their dinner are selected for their qualities as potential subjects for a still life – and when Tata decides that Joseph might serve as a model for his latest painting, the writer is permitted to stay, and even to write.
A seductive combination of romance, puzzle and poetry, The Artist also offers a considered interrogation of the value of art: to open windows in human existence, to push against limits, to bring freedom, perspective and light.
Amazon: Kindle $15.99; Paperback $21.25
Booktopia: $21.75
Sutherland Library: Book – 3 copies
