Recommended reading (Jen)
These highly acclaimed books may interest you if you’re looking for a great read. I recently read all five and loved them all. Two are fiction books: Dream State and The Name of the Rose; and three are non-fiction: The Story of a Heart, Careless People, and Memorial Days.
Dream State by Eric Puchner
Cece is in love. She has arrived early at her in-laws’ beautiful lake house in Salish, Montana, to finish planning her wedding to Charlie, a cardiac anaesthesiologist with a brilliant future.
When Charlie asks Garrett, his best friend from college, to officiate the ceremony, Cece can’t imagine anyone less appropriate for the task. After all, Garrett, a depressed baggage handler at the local airport, doesn’t believe in marriage. But as she spends time with him and his gruff mask slips, she grows increasingly uncertain about her future, leading to an impulsive decision that will alter the three friends’ lives forever – the events of that summer reverberating across fifty years and spanning generations.
Simultaneously following in the tradition of the great American novel and reinventing it from within, Dream State is at once an elegy to the endangered West, a study of the unholy catastrophe of marriage and a tender ode to the enduring beauty of friendship.
The Story of a Heart by Rachel Clarke
WINNER OF THE WOMEN’S PRIZE FOR NON-FICTION 2025
SHORTLISTED FOR THE BAILLIE GIFFORD PRIZE FOR NON-FICTION 2024
BOOK OF THE YEAR IN THE SPECTATOR, NEW STATESMAN, NEW SCIENTIST, AND PROSPECT
This is the unforgettable story of how one family’s grief transformed into a lifesaving gift. With tremendous compassion and clarity, Dr Rachel Clarke relates the urgent journey of a young girl’s heart and explores a history of remarkable medical innovations , stretching back over a century and involving the knowledge and dedication not just of surgeons but of countless physicians, immunologists, nurses and scientists.
Careless People by Sarah Wynn-Williams
Shocking and darkly funny, Careless People gives you a front-row seat to the decisions that are shaping our world and the people who make them. Welcome to Facebook.
Sarah Wynn-Williams, a young diplomat from New Zealand, pitched for her dream job. She saw Facebook’s potential and knew it could change the world for the better. But, when she got there and rose to its top ranks, things turned out a little different.
From wild schemes cooked up on private jets to risking prison abroad, Careless People exposes both the personal and political fallout when boundless power and a rotten culture take hold. In a gripping and often absurd narrative, Wynn-Williams rubs shoulders with Mark Zuckerberg, Sheryl Sandberg and world leaders, revealing what really goes on among the global elite – and the consequences this has for all of us.
Candid and entertaining, this is an intimate memoir set amid powerful forces. As all our lives are upended by technology and those who control it, Careless People will change how you see the world.
The Name of the Rose by Umberto Eco
Read the enthralling medieval murder mystery.
The year is 1327. Franciscans in a wealthy Italian abbey are suspected of heresy, and Brother William of Baskerville arrives to investigate. When his delicate mission is suddenly overshadowed by seven bizarre deaths, Brother William turns detective.
William collects evidence, deciphers secret symbols and coded manuscripts, and digs into the eerie labyrinth of the abbey where extraordinary things are happening under the cover of night. A spectacular popular and critical success, The Name of the Rose is not only a narrative of a murder investigation but an astonishing chronicle of the Middle Ages.
‘Whether you’re into Sherlock Holmes, Montaillou, Borges, the nouvelle critique, the Rule of St. Benedict, metaphysics, library design, or The Thing from the Crypt, you’ll love it’ Sunday Times
Memorial Days: A Memoir by Geraldine Brooks
A heartrending and beautiful memoir of sudden loss and a journey toward peace, from the bestselling, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Horse
Many cultural and religious traditions expect those who are grieving to step away from the world. In contemporary life, we are more often met with red tape and to-do lists. This is exactly what happened to Geraldine Brooks when her partner of more than three decades, Tony Horwitz – just sixty years old and, to her knowledge, vigorous and healthy – collapsed and died on a Washington, DC street.
After spending their early years together in conflict zones as foreign correspondents, and living in Sydney, Geraldine and Tony settled down to raise two boys on Martha’s Vineyard, Massachusetts. The life they built was one of meaningful work, good humour, and tenderness, as they spent their days writing and their evenings cooking family dinners or watching the sun set with friends. But all of this came to an abrupt end when, on the US Memorial Day public holiday of 2019, Geraldine received the phone call we all dread. The demands were immediate and many. Without space to grieve, the sudden loss became a yawning gulf.
Three years later, she booked a flight to remote Flinders Island off the coast of Tasmania with the intention of finally giving herself the time to mourn. In a shack on the island’s pristine, rugged coast she often went days without seeing another person. There, she pondered the various ways in which cultures grieve, and what rituals of her own might help to rebuild a life around the void of Tony’s death.
A spare and profoundly moving memoir that joins the classics of the genre, Memorial Days is a portrait of a larger-than-life man and a timeless love between souls that exquisitely captures the joy, agony and mystery of life.
‘It’s personal, immediate, an opening up. It’s from the heart . . . Geraldine’s gift to us is that she has written her truth’ THE AUSTRALIAN WOMEN’S WEEKLY
‘Heartbreaking yet hopeful. We’re lucky to have Brooks to help us make sense of the world’ WA TODAY
‘Quiet, vulnerable and tender . . . Radically and beautifully open’ SYDNEY MORNING HERALD
